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Vol. 3, No. 107. May 5, 1883. Annual S ubscription, $25.00 

HOUSE-KEEPING 

AND 

HOME-MAKING 

BY 

MARION HARLAND 

Al/THOR OK 

COMMON SENSK IN THE KITCHEN, Kk .. r ir. 



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MARION HARLAND'S LATEST AND GREATEST WORK 

*'EVE'S DAUGHTERS;" 

OR, 

COMMON SENSE FOR MAID, WIFE AND MOTHER. 

BY MARlOJi HAKLAXD, 

Author of " Common Sense in the Household." 

(100,000 Copies sold.) 

DEDICATED TO THE WIVES, MOTHERS and DAXjaHTERS OF AMERICA. 

One large Iseautifully tound volume, Price $2.00 

Sent by Mail Post Paid on Receipt of Price. 



JOHN R. ANDERSON & HENRY S. ALLEN, 

Publishers, Nos. 66 & 63 Reade St., 

New York.. 



PUBLISHERS' NOTICE. 

In submitting to the Public a selection from the many 
hundred testimonials received from eminent men and women, 
and the press, as to the merits of " Eve's Daughters," the 
publishers respectfulh' urge a careful reading of the same, in 
the belief that as all will gladly welcome a long-needed work 
of this character, they will be interested in knowing the opin- 
ions of those best qualified to judge of its merits. It is within 
the truth to say that no work hitherto published in the interest 
of women has met with the demand and high approval accorded 
" Eve's D.\ughters." Marion Harland writes from the heart. 
and has in this work treated matters of the most vital impor- 
tance to women in a masterly and yet most delicate and charm- . 
ing manner. In the firm belief that the work will be found byi 
all thoughtful women a necessity, we submit the same for their 
patronage. 

See page xii. and xiv. for Introduction and Contents of this 
book. 



OPINIONS OF NOTED MEN AND WOMEN, 

" Marion Harland has given expression to many and valua- 
ble truths. . . . A book that evidently well recommends itself." 
— Lucrctia R, Garfield. 



" Marion Harland has a genuine love for girls, and appre- 
ciates their position, its delights and its dangers; she has told 
them in a natural, chatty style, with infinite tact and purity, 
just what to do and what to avoid doing, in order to secure 
health and the best and highest development in brain and body; 
I cordially recommend the book to ' Eve's daughters ' in every 
part of our country." — Kate Sanborn, Depaj-tment of English 
Literature, Smith College. 

" After a careful perusal of ' Eve's Daughters,' I can heartily 
endorse every word uttered by others in commendation of it. 
It seems to me to be a gospel of salvation addressed to suffer- 
ing humanity, and a golden rule for mothers, which proclaims 
and promises 'peace on earth and good will toward men.' 
Who can estimate the good it may do ?" — Benson y. Lossing, 
LL.D. 

" I congratulate you more and more upon the happy manner 
in which you have executed a noble and delicate task. It is a 
book that no daughter of Eve — in our country, at least — should 
be without." — i/ic^ge) Albion IV. Tourgc'e, Author of" A Fool's 
Ei-rand," etc. 

" A very useful work. I trust it will be widely read." — Emily 
Faithful!, London, England. 

"'Eve's Daughters' should be included in the reading of 
every mother in the land. No home should lack a copy where 
daughters are being reared. The topics discussed are of vital 
importance to every woman. They are so plainly discussed 
that every one can understand, and so delicately that the most 
fastidious need not be offended." — Airs. Mary A. Livermore. 

"Contains much useful advice." — Frances Fewer Cohbe, Lon- 
don., England. 

" I would rather have it for my daughters than a gold mine, 
if my choice lay between the two." — Airs. Mary E. Niks, 
Hornellsville, N. Y. 

" I heartily endorse the book; if there is anything in it which 
is not right, I have failed to find it in two or three searches." — 
Rev. S. Iremvus Piime, D.D. 

" Bright and attractive in style, true and solid in'matter." — 
Rev. John Hall, D.D. 

"You have bravely and zealously undertaken a work for 
women which they will have cause to thank you for. You have 
' mothered ' the whole generation in your unshrinking counsel. 
I trust it may help as you desire and return to you in gratitude 
and appreciation." — Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney. 



Ill 

"I welcome 'Eve's Daughters' to the library shelves of 
every home where there are girls, and desire for it a wide cir- 
culation among prospective fathers and mothers." — P lube A. 
Hanaford. 

" Whoever reads the book will read it straight to the end. 
The profound and marvellous amount of thought and research, 
so easily, almost unconsciously, but lovingly brought to the 
work will doubtless give it an extended sale and make it prove 
a help to tens of thousands." — Rev. Geo. S. Bishop, D.D. 

" Although dealing with practical matters of the utmost im- 
portance to woman in her various relations, it has all the inter- 
est of a romance. The wisdom, good judgment and real literary 
tact shown by the author enhance its value and commend it to 
public favor." — Horatio Alger ^ Jr, 



OPINIONS OF EMINENT PHYSICIANS. 

" I am glad to sec that your counsel to your sex is marked 
by discretion and based on knowledge of the complex elements 
of the problem you have to deal with. It is needed and will be 
useful, especially as coming from a womati who knows what 
she is talking about." — Oliver Wendell Holmes, M.D., Boston. 

" My practice for seventeen years has been in great measure 
genealogical, and with the sad lessons caused by ignoronce and 
neglect of the truths so ably set forth in this work, ever thrust 
upon my attention, I cannot but speak strongly, because know- 
ingly. I most heartily congratulate the author of ' Eve's Daugh- 
ters ' upon having so admirably filled a niche in literature which 
was sadly vacant." — Geo. S. Ward, A/.D., Newark, N. J. 

" The author has trodden this ' hidden path ' of heretofore 
forbidden literature in a bold yet chaste manner, which com- 
mends the work to the most fastidious. Her views on the 
physiology and etiology of the many diseases of her sex evince 
a thorough knowledge of the most advanced ideas of the best 
authors on this subject, supplemented by her own matronly 
experience. She has done a great service to the women of this 
country." — -J. S. Dorsey Cullen, Af.D., Professor of Sw-geiy in 
Medical College of Virginia. 

"The story of the mother's relations to her growing daugh- 
ter from infancy to budding womanhood is beautifully told. 
The work may be said to be a comprehensive text book for 
women." — James Darrach, M.D., Germantown, Penn. 



IV 

" I can heartily endorse your advice from beginning to end. 
I wish our mothers would read and then follow it." — David 
Clark, M,D., Springfield, Mass. 

" I have read ' Eve's Daughters' with more than usual inter- 
est as a nor.-professional work on a professional subject. Usu- 
ally such attempts are blunders. This is a success, both in the 
modesty and delicacy of the handling and in the common sense 
which pervades its advice to young women. I wish it all suc- 
cess." — Sanford B. Htiiit, M.D., late Professor of Anatomy and 
Physiology in Buffalo Medical College. 

" I have found one page worth the price of the book." — Prof, 
y. R. Yeager, M.D. 

"A valuable contribution to morals. It strikes a blow 
where one is most needed. The work will certainly do great 
good." — E. P. Fowler, M.D., New York City. 

"I am glad that at last woman is studying woman. This 
work of Marion Harland's, by popularizing the views of the 
best modern thinkers on the problems of the comparative psy- 
chology and hygiene of the sexes, will aid all those who are 
looking for light in this direction." — George M. Beard, M.D., 
New York City. 

" ' Eve's Daughters' is a book for ' maid, wife, and mother,* 
60 charmingly written that each succeeding page is a fresh de- 
light. Physicians and philanthropists have long felt the need 
of the utterance of these truths and of the present manner of 
saying them." — Lelia G. Bedell, M.D., Chicago, III. 

" It is written with the vivacity which lends a charm to her 
other works. I believe that a girl, well-born and brought up 
on the principles inculcated in this book, could hardly fail to be 
'healthy and wise,' and could thus afford 7tot to be 'wealthy.'" 
Mary Putnam facodi, M.D., N^ew York. 

" It is charmingly written, and presents subjects with which 
every woman should be acquainted, in a delicate and refined 
manner. I feel no hesitation in recommending it to young 
girls. — Mary E. Allen, M.D., Resident Physician at Vassar 
College. 

OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. 

"It is a singularly straightforward, practical, and sensible 
work, and would do more good for the coming generation 
of women, if read and pondered by the present generation 
than all the family doctors and medicine in Christendom." — 
Detroit Eveninsr News. 



"It ought to have an extensive reading." — Philadelphia 
Evening Bulletin. 

■'We commend the earnest book of this accomplished gentle- 
woman to her wide circle of American sisters." — N. Y. Mail 
'and Express. 

"Lively, entertaining, strong, and clear. She means what 
she says and admirably says what she means." — Newark Daily 
Advertiser. 

" Bright, chatty, frank, sensible, brimful of womanly intui- 
tions, informations, and advice." — Springfield Republican. 

"An earnest, conscientious, intelligent grapple with the 
struggles, troubles, and mysteries of woman's life." — Syracuse 
Standard. 

" It discusses these subjects with a frankness and force only 
equalled by the true delicacy of both word and phrase. It is 
the utterance of a sensible Christian wife and mother who has 
lived with her own eyes open." — The Congregationalist, Boston. 

"Thousands of lives might have been brightened and many 
tears prevented, and ten thousand anxious days and nights 
avoided, had the good sense of these pages been incorporated 
into the daily work of the household." — ^V. Y. Observer. 

" Every mother must be a better mother, every wife a better 
wife, and every daughter a better daughter for reading this 
book." — Penn College Monthly. 

"A book most admirable in tone, spirit, and style. It ought 
to be put into the hands of every girl in the land. The author 
has done a trying and difficult work, but her success is worthy 
of all congratulation. The world is better in consequence of 
such noble and true words." — Philadelphia Press. 

" No work heretofore published in the interest of her sex has 
been its equal." — N. Y. Home Journal. 

" The volume is the sympathetic and courageous effort of a 
thoughtful and loving Christian woman to enlighten the women 
of America as to the needs, the failures, the sins, the capabili- 
ties, and the possibilities of the sex. . . . Frank, wise and 
kindly talks. . . . " — Harper's Monthly Magazine. 

"So delicately and wiselj' written as to be not only an un- 
questionable authority, but a witness to the earnest heart and 
mind of the writer, who deserves the gratitude of all women 
for a true woman's true words in their interest." — The Contiy 
nent. 

"A book of the highest value." — Albafiy Press. 







chji<^<^ JL 



c/^ ^^^iSff/^ <?-r-&</" ^^C^^^-C 




HOUSEKEEPIi^a 



HOME-MAKING, 



■WITH CHAPTERS ON 



DEESS AND GOSSIP. 
MARION HARLAND. 

TAKEN FROM HER LATEST WORK, 

"EVE'S DAUGHTERS"; OR, COMMON SENSE FOE MAID, 
WIPE AND MOTHER. 



^>;;6?Y RIGHT. ^-^J^ 
r. Ju*. 






NEW YORK : 

JOHN W. LOVELL COMPANY. 

14 AND 16 V^SEy Street. 






-xK 



\ 



COPYRIOHT, 1883, 1883, BY 

J. K. ANDERSON and H. S. ALLEN. 



Housekeeping and Home-making 



CHAPTERS ON DRESS AND GOSSIP. 



"The making of a true home is really our peculiar and in- 
alienable right — a right which no man can take from us; — fera 
man can no more make a home than a drone can make a hive." 
— Frances Power Cobbe, " Duties of IVomen." 

About once in every lustrum the press of 
the country breaks out in active warfare on 
the vexed question of woman's work and 
woman's wages. The paper cannonade is 
carried on for some time between those who 
represent the employers, and the larger party 
who uphold the rights of the employed ; a mul- 
titude of foolish and some good things being 
said on both sides ; then mutters itself into 
silence like any other harmless sort of thun- 



4 HOUSEKEEPING AND HOME-MAKING. 

der. Nobody is convinced and nobody hurt, 
excepting the novices among workwomen 
who have not yet learned that detonation *" 
is not reform, nor, of necessity, germane to 
it. 

Among things worthy of record that grew 
out of such a sham-fight about fourteen years 
since, was a brief, strong reply penned by 
Madame Demorest, the celebrated modiste 
and fashionist of New York, to the inquiry 
why so few women attain to complete mas- 
tery of any craft. 

" Because," wrote Madame (I quote from 
memory), " not one in ten thousand expects 
to make this or that trade the business of her 
life. It is something by which she hopes to 
earn bread and clothes until she gets mar- 
ried. Being perpetually on the outlook for' 
the fortunate chance that is to relieve her 
from the necessity of paid labor, she is con- 
tent to learn just as little as will suffice to 
keep her in her situation. The man, who 
knows that he is fitting himself for a call- 



HOUSEKEEPING AND HOME-MAKING. 5 

ing he will relinquish only with existence, 
makes it a part of himself, and himself a part 
of it." 

Everybody professed to be satisfied with 
this solution, which was indubitably true and 
altogether pertinent, viewing the problem 
from Madame's standpoint. We understood, 
or thought we did, why those of our young 
women who are forced to maintain them- 
selves are content with mediocrity in voca- 
tions that are but makeshifts at the best, and 
why those of us for whom they condescend 
to work while they are on their promotion 
consent to accept the results of "journey" 
labor. 

Madame Demorest has, perhaps, accounted 
for the fact that there are so few artistes in 
the United States. Who will explain the 
fact, yet more patent, of the growing neglect 
of practical housewifery on the part of young 
women whose hope and expectation are to 
possess and take care of houses of their own 
at some — perchance very early — day ? That 



O HOUSEKEEPING AND HOME-MAKING. 

they are thus indifferent is no haphazard as- 
sertion. 

I do not forget that cookery is taking its 
place as a fine-art in our land, and is, there- 
fore, patronized by our "best circles." I 
have seen the artistically business-like blank 
books open upon silken laps and rich fur 
muffs, diamonded fingers flying over them in 
the eager effort to preserve the directions of 
Signor Blot and Miss Parloa, during their 
"fascinating" illustrated lectures. I enjoy 
— nobody more — the fun of salad-clubs and 
cooking-circles, especially the " high teas" to 
which the intimate friends of the fair ciiisi- 
7tzhres are bidden to partake of dishes pre- 
pared "exclusively" by themselves. 

I recall one which was conducted upon 
-strictly conscientious principles, that began 
with raw oysters and wound up with confec- 
tioner's ices. 

" But indeed we got up everything else !" 
cried a candid member, when rallied upon 
the inconsistency. "That is, of course, 



HOUSEKEEPING ANI) HOME-MAKING. 7 

Mamma's cook made the coffee and broiled 
the chops, and the Vienna rolls had to be 
bought, you know !" 

We recollect that Marie Antoinette made 
rolls of butter on marble shelves from cream 
skimmed with golden ladles, and smile in- 
dulgence of girlish freaks. Playing at cook- 
ing is less hurtful than the " German," and 
less exciting than the whjst-table. The 
graceful game does not blind the watchful 
student of their "tricks and manners" to 
" our girls' " general ignorance of domestic 
economy, their utter inability to enter, with 
credit to us or to themselves, upon the prac- 
tical business of housewifery next week or 
next month. 

I believe, fully and sorrowfully, that in 
this incompetency lies part of the secret of 
the early fading and invalidism of so many 
of our young wives. Our grandmothers did 
their own housework, often including wash- 
ing, ironing, spinning, and weaving ; bore 
many children, and lived and died in general 



8 HOUSEKEEPING AND HOME-MAKING. 

ignorance of the rules of hygiene and or- 
thography. Then ran like wild-fire over the 
country the craze of " women's higher edu- 
cation," and piano-forte makers and physi- 
cians grew rich. The women who were girls 
thirty years ago knew little enough of house- 
hold management when they were married. 
They have, as a whole, seen to it that their 
daughters shall know less. 

To exemplify the universality of this re- 
missness, take two instances from widely- 
severed spheres of thought, action, and so- 
cial position. 

.;;:'('! was the eldest of a large family," said 
the wife of a millionaire. " My mother was 
delicate, we were not wealthy, and much of 
the responsibility of the care of house and 
children devolved upon me. I pity myself 
as I look back upon my burdened girlhood, 
although I did not then appreciate the in- 
justice done to me. My daughters shall not 
be prematurely careworn if I can help it." ■ 

In pursuance of this humane policy, she 



HOUSEKEEPING AND HOME-MAKING. 9 

has fitted them to become the accomplished 
wives of men not less affluent than their 
father, provided they can always secure the 
services of housekeepers and an able corps 
of servants to assist them in bearing the re* 
sponsibility. -t' •; 

The second mother to whom I shall refer 
is as loving and ruthful for her offspring as 
the rich man's wife, although only the help- 
meet of a small New England farmer. She 
has two daughters— buxom damsels — fifteen 
and seventeen years old ; yet chancing to 
have business at the farm a few summers 
since, I found her pale and tremulous from 
a spell of fever, churning several gallons of 
milk, pausing every few minutes to recover 
breath and strength. 

. " Surely you are unfit for that !" said I, 
compassionately. " Cannot your girls do 
it ?" 

" I don't think such hard labor is good for 
growing girls," she answered, the poor wan 
face softening as she went on. " I have had 



10 HOUSEKEEPING AND HOME-MAKING. 

to work so hard all my days that I can't bear 
to set them at it." 

" But if they marry," I suggested. 

She sighed. " Ah ! then they will be 
obleeged to come to it. There's all the 
more reason, you see, ma'am, why I should 
spare them while I can." 

In the half day I spent with her I saw 
her knead the bread and get the dinner 
ready, thanking, with gratitude pitiable to 
behold, one daughter who picked up and 
brought in a basket of chips, and the other 
who ungraciously laid by a hat she was trim- 
ming for herself, to^ set the table. 

" I'm obleeged to call on the poor chil- 
dren to do so many things that it's a wonder 
they don't get clean out of patience and run 
away from home," she observed in their 
hearing. " My sickness has been an awful 
cross to them." 

The girls' faces said that she had not over- 
stated the case. 

The elder spoke out pertly : 



HOUSEKEEPING AND HOME-MAKING. II 

" She hasn't been able to fetch in a stick 
of wood for over a month. Indeed, she's 
been ailing pretty much all the time since 
she had the fever first — a year ago in Au- 
gust." 

" Yet," I answered, " she has done all the 
cooking, churning, bread and butter mak- 
ing, the family sewing, cleans windows and 
paint, makes the beds, svreeps and dusts, and 
fills up the crannies of leisure left from all 
this by taking in plain sewing and knitting. 
I do not think a healthy woman could do 
more." 

The girl bridled at my tone. 

" I am sure we just wear ourselves out 
helping mother !" she retorted. " I'm tired 
all the time, and half of my own work goes 
undone." 

I heard an echo of her lament uttered in 
more refined accents not many days ago. 

" I don't complain of the sacrifice of my 
time and pursuits," murmured an affectionate 
daughter. " I am willing to help mamma in 



12 HOUSEKEEPING AND HOME-MAKING. 

every conceivable way. I devote an hour of 
every day to dusting the parlors and taking 
care of my own room, and often make cake 
and jeflly, besides arranging the flowers and 
fruit whenever we have company. But I 
don't think mothers appreciate what their 
children do for them. I know mine takes 
all this as her due, and nothing more. She 
seldom even thanks me for it." 

Here is the source of discontent. Our 
daughters fit loosely into their places in our 
homes. What they do there is for us, and 
of grace, and they are defrauded if due recom- 
pense of thanks is not awarded to them for 
" helping mother." We are not likely to 
rebel at this order of things, ours being glad 
and willing service. The fear of drawing 
down the suspicion of selfishness upon our 
singleness of loyalty by assigning a share of 
domestic cares to them as the work they 
must underta.key(?r their own sake, blinds us 
to their real good. 

Where is the mother who has the moral 



HOUSEKEEPING AND HOME-MAKING. I3 

courage to say to the emancipated school- 
girl : " You begin now another and important 
novitiate. Under my tutelage you must 
study housekeeping in all departments and 
details. In one year's time you should be 
competent to take my place if necessary. I 
expect and shall demand of you a practical 
knowledge of baking, roasting, boiling, fry- 
ing, broiling, as well as of mixing. It is not 
enough for you to understand the art of pre- 
paring ' fancy ' sweets. You must be versed 
in the mysteries of soups, gravies and entrdes. 
Moreover, you must learn how to market 
wisely, and to accommodate expenditures 
to means. All this and much more of the 
same sort of housewifery will be impera- 
tively needed should you marry. If you 
remain single it will yet be of incalculable - 
service to you and a wholesome exercise of 
mind and body." 

Yet this is plain common sense, and the 
sagacity of pure, disinterested affection. We 
are cowardly, false to ourselves that we do 



14 HOUSEKEEPING AND HOME-MAKING. 

not put it in practice — false to our trust, and 
cruel to our darlings in hardening our hands 
and toughening our muscles in order to keep 
theirs soft and flaccid. 

It is almost inevitable that our young mar- 
ried women should break down under the 
sudden weight of care and labor. Tempers 
are frayed at the edges, spines ache and hearts 
are wrung to anguish. The overtaxed spirit 
joins in the protest of the feeble flesh against 
the strain and the torture. 

At whose door lies the fault ? 

In many instances, mother and daughter 
may justly divide it. One errs after serious 
and unselfish calculation of the weight of two 
evils. She can force her child into a delight- 
less routine of labor ; be stung and stabbed 
by the sight of her reluctant performance of 
detested impositions and the hearing of her 
mutinous murmurs over the squandering of 
her precious time on what servants are bound 
to perform. Or, she can let her bonny nest- 
ling flutter free from servile chains, gladdening 



HOUSEKEEPING AND HOME-MAKING. 15 

her home that now is, with chirp and song, 
with no prevision of future enslavement. 

The daughter sins, generally, through igno- 
rance and vainglorious judgment, convinced 
honestly that she has argued the whole mat- 
ter out to a logical conclusion. Her time 
and strength are worth more than a seam- 
stress's, or chambermaid's or cook's wages. 
The world teems with seamstresses, chamber- 
maids, and cooks, clamoring for the very 
work she abhors. On the right hand she 
sees demand. On the left, supply. Political 
and social economy say, " Bring the two to- 
gether," whatever domestic maxims may 
advise. Before condemning the girl for 
shortsighted policy, let us see whether the 
fond father's reasonings do not tend in the 
same direction. The labor of an educated 
woman — especially if that woman is his 
child, and her scholastic education has cost 
him thousands of dollars — should, he predi- 
cates, command a better market-price than 
that of an illiterate Celt, whose schooling cost 



1 6 HOUSEKEEPING AND HOME-MAKING. 

nothing. Else, the aforesaid thousands were 
a poor investment, and higher education a 
failure. 

If there is a certainty that his accomplished 
daughter will never be summoned by Love 
or Duty to the presidency of another home 
than his ; an establishment to be kept in 
order and provided with things suitable ; in 
which people must sleep, eat and be cared 
for — his representations have much weight. 
It seems a sorry business — a waste of fine 
material, to break in a blooded colt to the 
work of a draught-horse. But the blooded 
horse that cannot draw at all in harness will 
hardly be selected for family use. 

To descend to particulars ; German, belles^ 
lettres and music suffer no serious interruption 
from the hour or two of stirring exercise that 
precede the season of study. The fair novice 
is better in health, and if her conscience is 
rightly adjusted, more buoyant in spirit for 
the light housework that falls to her share. 
There is unfeigned joy in the knowledge that 



HOUSEKEEPING AND HOME-MAKING. 1/ 

she is helping, if only so much as by the lift- 
ing of a finger, to ease the weight her mother 
has carried, unaided, all these years. 

The saddest story written in this country 
and century is in a book from which I have 
already drawn one or two extracts. "The 
btory of Avis" leaves the reader with an un- 
cured, perhaps an incurable, heart-ache. It 
appears ungracious to handle professionally, 
as befits a housewifely matron, heart-fibres so 
tense and sore as are those of the woman- 
artist who is the heroine. It seems inhuman, 
too, after the author's plea : — 

"Women upon whom domestic details sit 
with a natural, or even an acquired grace, will 
need to cultivate their sympathies with this 
young recoiling creature." 

In spite of our sober judgment and dis- 
approval of the fallacies of " Avis's " reason- 
ing, our sympathies with her grow fast and 
warm without cultivation, when we read her 
life-long protest against these — to her — ab- 
horrent " details." 



1 8 HOUSEKEEPING AND HOME-MAKING. 

" I hate to make my bed ; and I hate, hate 
to sew chemises ; and I hate, hate, /la^c to go 
cooking around the kitchen. It makes a 
crawling down my back to sew. But the 
crawling comes from hating ; the more I hate, 
the more I crawl. And Mamma never 
cooked about the kitchen. I think that is a 
servant's work. I'm very ugly to Aunt 
Chloe sometimes, Papa. On the whole, 
Papa," added the child gravely, "I have so 
many sorrows in this world that I don't care 
to live !" 

Almost twenty years later, won as we are 
made to comprehend, against her will and 
conscience, since she is wedded to Art, we 
see the betrothed Avis : — 

" Across her picture or her poem, looking 
up a little blindly, she had listened to the 
household chatter of women with a kind of 
gentle indifference, such as one feels about 
the habits of the Feejeeans. Unbleached 
cotton, like X in the algebra, represented an 
unknown quantity of oppressive but ex- 



HOUSEKEEPING AND HOME-MAKING. 1 9 

tremely distant facts. How had she brought 
herself into a world where the fringe upon a 
towel must become a subject requiring fixed 
opinions?" 

The author of "The Silent Partner" and 
" Hedged In" could not, consistently with 
the depths of true, helpful womanliness in her 
own nature, and her appreciation of the dig- 
nity and worth of common things and com- 
mon lives, do otherwise than paint Avis as 
an abnormal creation — a stray bird that had 
lost herself in a foreign and uncongenial 
clime. As a child she is to be pitied more 
than loved. Only the mother who died 
while she was an infant in years, understood 
her, even then. The " pretty mother," who 
was " a thin sweet vision, like a fading sketch 
to the young girl's heart," when "she recalled 
with incisive distinctness" that she had been 
" snatched, kissed and cried over with a gush 
of incoherent words and scalding tears," after 
putting the question, — 

"Did you never want to run away after 



20 HOUSEKEEPING AND HOME-MAKING. 

you had married Papa ? Did you never care 
about the theatre again ?" 

The wife (she " had, beyond doubt, the 
histrionic gift " — so said her grave husband) 
sobbed over the baby who had but this 
"glimpse into her mother's heart" — "Oh, 
my little woman ! Mother's little woman, 
little woman !" Avis's unrest and her genius 
were inherited. 

As a girl, we wonder at Coy's fondness for 
one whose affections, with heart and ambi- 
tions, are bound up in her art. A wife she 
ought never to have been at all, and mater- 
nal devotion is born slowly out of throes of 
as deadly anguish as those that brought her 
children into a home where they were not 
wanted. Her natural inclination and her 
subsequent growth are all on one side. She 
suffers from this excrescent development as 
from any other deformity. It is not more 
fair to accept her as a representative woman 
than to take as the typical American student 
a young collegian of whom I have lately 



HOUSEKEEPING AND HOME-MAKING. 21 

heard — a semi-idiot upon most subjects and 
utterly deficient in common sense. He can- 
not do an example in simple Addition or 
Subtraction ; in History he is a dunce, and 
in Geography would be puzzled if asked to 
define the difference between a continent and 
an isthmus. But he acquires languages as 
by intuition, and is the lingual prodigy of his 
university, writing and speaking Latin, 
Greek, German and Spanish with equal fa- 
cility. 

Still another man is a walking Encyclo- 
paedia of historical and political lore. He 
can give the date and substance of not only 
every notable debate in the American Con- 
gress since the establishment of our indepen- 
dent government, but of every Parliamentary 
battle that has interested the English people 
for the last hundred years. Burke, Chatham, 
Fox, North and Canning are as real in their 
personality to him as Bright and Gladstone. 
But this phenomenal memory takes hold of 
nothing beyond historical and parliamentary 



22 HOUSEKEEPING AND HOME-MAKING. 

detail. For all he knows of general litera- 
ture and of the practical concerns of life, he 
might be an animated copy of the Congres- 
sional Globe bound in whole calf. 

Few men are great, even in one direction 
— and fewer women. This small number of 
both sexes may plan the work of the world. 
It is carried into successful operation from 
age to age by people of evenly-balanced 
minds and healthful energies. Your one- 
ideaed man is as truly diseased in perception 
and in judgment as is the woman who rides 
her hobby of art, literature, social, religious, 
or political reform rough-shod over the 
wreck of domestic comfort and happiness. 
She who neglects to comb her hair and darn 
her children's socks while she is painting for 
posterity, or accepts an invitation to address 
a Woman's Suffrage Convention that calls 
her a hundred miles away from home when 
her baby lies ill with croup, would be as self- 
ish in devotion to her specialty had her 
choice lighted on Kensington embroidery or 



HOUSEKEEPING AND HOME-MAKING. 23 

preserves. I was once so unfortunate as to 
talk with a distressed mother who could not 
see her way clear to go to her eldest son, 
dying from injuries received in a railway 
accident, because she was in the middle of 
spring house-cleaning. 

" And you know the Servants wouldn't 
half do it, if I were not here to look after 
them !" she moaned. 

The boy died, asking with his last coher- 
ent word, " When is mother coming ?" She 
never blamed herself. She was the victim of 
circumstances over which she had no control. 
Had she been a literary woman of note, the 
story would have found its way into the 
newspapers. Being of a strictly domestic 
turn she missed the distinction she merited 
by singleness of devotion to The Object of 
her life. 

Let us be fair in judgment and in verdict. 
While we do not shield morbidly-absorbed 
artists and housekeepers from censure by the 
excuse that, as women, evenness of develop- 



24 HOUSEKEEPING AND HOME-MAKING. 

ment is not to be expected of them, we do 
not forget the measure of obloquy due to 
him who forgets wife, children, and his own 
physical needs in warehouse, office, or atelier. 
His neglect of assumed and sacred duties 
tells less upon the surface of home and soci- 
ety than would the like dereliction on the 
part of her who must order dinners and look 
after the family wardrobe, but it is one and 
the same sin with hers. 

. The perfect intellect in either sex is many- 
sided, rounded, firm in poise, wide in com- 
prehension of the infinite, delicate in percep- 
tion of the finite. 

I remark in passing, that a charming ex- 
ample of the truth just stated is exhibited in 
a volume lately read in our home circle with 
such delighted interest as usually waits upon 
the perusal of an engaging romance. It is 
entitled, "The Formation of Vegetable Mold 
through the Action of Worms, with Obser- 
vations on their Habits." The author is 
Charles Darwin, LL.D., F.R.S. 



HOUSEKEEPING AND HOME-MAKING. 2$ 

It is not then a token of inherent mental 
or spiritual dignity when the educated daugh- 
ter refuses initiation into the homely cere- 
monies of cookery — objects to the trouble- 
some details which are soon comprehended 
and put into practice by the half-witted Celt 
or the Scandinavian who cannot speak a 
word of the language of her adopted land. 
The intellect that recoils from the acquisition 
of the simple principles of mixing, baking, 
and boiling, because they disturb the calm 
balance of thought, must rest upon a very 
slender pivot. The apprenticeship to unfa- 
miliar and not agreeable work that makes 
college Jane " crawl," does not rub into her 
nerves more roughly than the alphabet galls 
the dull-minded scullion thumbing her " First 
Reader" every night at the kitchen-table. 
She has been twitted with her ignorance — 
"a gurrl grown, and not able to read an' 
spell !" Literature and all pertaining to let- 
ters are quite out of her line. She will 
probably not read one book a year after pre- 



26 HOUSEKEEPING AND HOME-MAKING. 

paring herself for the work ; but spurred by 
a single incentive, she drudges on stub- 
bornly. 

A servant of my own once begged me to 
"tache her to write." Her betrothed had 
told her, with the refined gallantry of his 
class, that he was "fair ashamed of her be- 
cause she couldn't so much as read a love- 
letter, but must take it to the misthress to 
know what was in it." She had never been 
to school since her tenth year, and could 
hardly make out the sense of a printed page, 
but in three months' time she penned, with- 
out my assistance, a note to her absent 
lover : 

" Dear Mike, — This is to tel you I am 
wel and hoppin you are enjyin the same 
blesin thank god. I have lerned how to 
Wright an also how to reade wrighting. now 
send on yure leters. 

" no moore at present from yure lovin 
"Mary O'Reilly." 



HOUSEKEEPING AND HOME-MAKING. 27 

She taught me many and more valuable 
lessons than she had 'from me as she sat each 
night under the shaded nursery lamp, her 
coarse stiff fingers cramped upon the pen- 
barrel, and made straight lines, pot-hooks, 
and hangers, until the perspiration broke 
through the pores of her red forehead. 

" D'ye think I'll ever be an azilhor, 
ma'am ?" she would ask anxiously sometimes, 
in submitting the exercise to my inspection. 

" Yes, Mary," I always answered, with no 
disposition to amusement at her blunder. 

Referring once more to "Avis," we read : 

"The usual little feminine bustle of sewing 
he (Ostrander) missed without regret. Wo- 
men fretted him with their eternal nervous 
stitch, stitching, and fathomless researches 
into the nature of tatting and crochet. He 
rather admired his wife for sharing so fully 
his objection to them. Avis was that rare 
woman who had never embroidered a tidy." 

Again, " It was not much perhaps to set 
herself now to conquer this little occasion ; 



28 HOUSEKEEPING AND HOME-MAKING. 

not much to descend from the sphinx to the 
drain-pipe at one fell swoop ; not much to 
watch the potatoes while Julia went to 
market ; to answer the door-bell while the 
jelly was straining ; to dress for dinner after 
her guests were in the parlor ; to resolve to 
engage a table-girl to-morrow because Julia 
tripped with the gravy ; to sit wondering how 
the ironing was to get done, while her hus- 
band talked of Greek sculpture — to bring 
creation out of chaos, law out of disorder, 
and a clear head out of wasted nerves. Life 
is composed of such little strains; and the 
artistic temperament is only more sensitive 
to, but can never hope to escape them. It 
was not much ; but let us not forget that it is 
under the friction of such atoms that women 
far simpler, and so for that yoke far stronger 
than Avis, have yielded their lives as a bur- 
den too heavy to be borne." 

The summary is painfully realistic. Each 
of us who has kept house for a single year 
subscribes groaningly to the accuracy of the 



HOUSEKEEPING AND HOME-MAKING. 29 

sketch. The question raised by my reason, 
and supported by experience is, whether even 
to the artistic temperament brier-scratches 
are ever fatal injuries. Annoyances they are, 
these atomic particles and points that bury 
themselves in tender skins. While the 
smart is new the sufferer is prone to cry out 
that her senses are deserting her ; but when 
the prickles are withdrawn, brave spirits arise 
superior to temporary irritation. A woman 
who had professed her willingness to spend 
two hundred days "in copying a carrot that 
hangs twenty feet away from you against the 
wall " ought to have been not merely brave 
but patient. 

Domestic life has its peculiar trials, but so 
has every other condition of this, our mortal 
probation. They who wear thin shoes and 
step gingerly will feel the pebbles in the path. 
It is the firm tread of the stout boot that 
presses them into the earth. 

You may pass a long, useful, and contented 
life without learning how to embroider a 



30 HOUSEKEEPING AND HOME-MAKING. 

tidy. As American homes now are — and 
there is faint prospect of reconstruction of 
our domestic system — no American woman, 
however exalted or assured her social rank, or 
whatever may be her accomplishments, can 
afford to remain ignorant of practical house- 
wifery. This is a rule without exception. 
Disregard of it is unwise and selfish. Absorp- 
tion in your chosen art or profession, however 
worthy it may be in itself, becomes a fault 
when it ignores the claims of others upon 
time and consideration. It is not enough 
that your aims are high, your ends noble. 
The canal leads to the ocean as surely as 
does the broad beneficent river, but it is only 
a straight, muddy ditch throughout its length. 

To absorb, to retain, to be nourished, to 
grow — all this is to receive. This is Hap- 
piness. To give of what you have and are — 
oi yourself — that others may be better and 
happier — this is Blessedness. 

By a beautiful provision of Nature, self- 
denial and work offered in this spirit and for 



HOUSEKEEPING AND HOME-MAKING. 3 1 

this purpose ennoble instead of dwarf heart 
and intellect. The antithesis of this proposi- 
tion is no less true ; to wit, that the pursuit 
of any object to the exclusion from thought 
and care of all besides, especially when the 
thing is coveted because the possession of it 
will contribute to our own enjoyment or 
advantage, will eventually harden and narrow 
the character. 

To be an excellent housekeeper is in itself 
one of the lesser aims of life to a woman of 
culture and refinement. The ministry to her 
kind by means of an intelligent comprehension 
of it, and just personal attention to " domestic 
details," should be a study and a purpose. 



DRESS. 

" Katherine. I'll have no bigger! This doth fit the time, 
And gentlewomen wear such caps as these. 

I never saw a better-fashioned gown, 
More quaint, more pleasing, more commendable. 
" Tatnivg of the Shrew.'" 

A STATISTICIAN, curious in such matters, 
has laid before me a computation to the effect 
that one third of the time of the working force 
of the average American household is em- 
ployed in making clean the clothes soiled 
during the other two thirds. Furthermore, 
that at least one third of the quantity remain- 
ing after this subtraction, is consumed in 
buying, making, and remodelling the garments 
designed to cover these perishable frames of 
ours. 

" Gallantry forbids me to hint," comments 
my philosophical friend, " how many im- 
mortal beings are, by this order of affairs. 



DRESS, 33 

converted into galvanized dummies for the 
display of 'clothes.' Much less would I 
dare conjecture how many women become, 
through such agencies as I have described, 
variegated husks, gilded swaths enclosing 
shrivelled kernels and dusty hollowness." 

All this catches the fancy of cynic and 
philosopher (I do not use the terms in this 
connection as interchangeable). Men are so 
used to declaiming against feminine methods 
of doing work, and feminine fancies, that 
they recognize the familiar jargon, accept 
it and pass it on, unchallenged and un- 
changed. 

Shaking our judgment free from plausible 
platitudes, let us consider one or two self- 
evident propositions. 

We must — being in a state of "artificial 
civilization" — wear clothes. Clothes must be 
clean, whole, decent, and suited in quality 
and make to the wearer. In the last clause 
we descry Prince Ahmed's pavilion. The 
millet-seed, when cracked, reveals the count- 



34 HOUSEKEEPING AND HOME-MAKING. 

less involutions of a canopy which unfurls to 
cover a mighty army. 

What is "suitable"? 

While the question seems to be clogged 
with peculiar complications in our democratic 
country, those who have travelled afar can 
testify that neither the peasant's garb, usually 
so picturesque, often so uncomfortable and 
senseless, nor conventual robes, rid the women 
who wear them from the pleasing anxieties 
that roll up into a burden of care with those 
who exalt " Wherewithal shall we be clothed ?" 
into the dignity of a Profession. The Quaker 
maiden, with face modest and fresh as an 
English daisy, bestows as much thought upon 
the texture and shade of the dove-colored gown 
and close bonnet as does Miss McFlimsey 
upon the gorgeous costume to be ruined in 
one night's whirl at a " crush" ball. In fact, 
I doubt if careful examination into the cir- 
cumstances and mental exercises of the two 
women would not reveal that she who clothes 
herself and family neatly, but with painstaking 



DRESS. 35 

economy, making "auld claithes gar amaist 
as well as new," expends more time and pains 
upon ways, means, and effects in dress than 
does she whose " variegated husk" is putative 
evidence of " dusty hoUowness." 

Frown as the utilitarian and ascetic may 
upon the pretty trifling, the truth cannot be 
set aside that dress has been a fine-art through- 
out the ages that have groaned themselves 
away into Eternity Past, since Eve, crouched 
among the bushes of Eden, hurriedly sewed 
up the seams of her fig-leaf apron. 

Hear stern Isaiah's prophecy against the 
wanton daughters of Zion : 

"In that day the Lord will take away the 
bravery of their tinkling ornaments about 
their feet, and their cauls and their round 
tires like the moon ; the chains, and the 
bracelets, and the mufflers, the bonnets, and 
the ornaments of the legs, and the head-bands, 
and the tablets, and the earrings, the rings, 
and the nose-jewels, the changeable suits of 
apparel, and the mantles, and the wimples, 



36 HOUSEKEEPING AND HOME-MAKING. 

and the crisping-pins, the glasses, and the fine 
linen, and the hoods, and the vails." 

We are moved by the glib catalogue to a 
shrewd surmise that the seer may have copied 
it from the advertising column of the ''Jeru- 
salem Journal des ModesJ' or interviewed a 
court-milliner. 

The world and women are better and more 
sensible now than in the generation when the 
fisherman Apostle — himself a married man, 
with a mother-in-law resident under his roof 
— recommends the ornament of a meek and 
quiet spirit to wives, as preferable to " plaiting 
the hair, and of wearing of gold, or of putting 
on of apparel." 

An unprejudiced child, in reading a pas- 
sage that has been quoted into shreds, must 
perceive that Peter does not prescribe this 
spiritual adornment as the bodily covering, or 
prohibit the "putting on of apparel." We 
have outgrown the idea that sin per se lurks 
in furs, laces, velvets, or even diamonds. The 
Wesleyan sister who, being in conscience 



DRESS. n 

bound to draw the line of demarcation be- 
tween church and world somewhere, drew it 
at feathers, wearing flowers instead in her 
Sunday bonnet, would be laughed at now in 
her own denomination. Every such distinc- 
tion is arbitrary, and the condemnation of re- 
cusants which is based upon it is unchristian 
and irrational. It is such fierce elevation of 
non-essentials into test-questions of inward 
graces that has brought scandal upon the 
professors and teachers of a Faith which is 
holy, harmless, and undefiled. 

Nor is there folly in cultivating a just 
taste for this Fine Art. A study of becom- 
ingness, of harmony of fabrics and colors — a 
knowledge of the prevailing modes and the 
ability to adapt these to the wishes and means 
of wearers — are as reasonable, in their way, 
as the endeavor to be so far acquainted with 
the general principles of music and painting 
as to be competent to discern between the 
good and bad of each art. Because a worthy 
thing is abused there is no need of casting 



38 HOUSEKEEPING AND HOME-MAKING. 

wholesale opprobrium upon it. Because a 
long-haired cockney has nursed his natural 
liking for music into a tumorous outgrowth 
that absorbs every other intellectual sense 
and offends the taste of his neighbors, am I 
to eschew Mendelssohn and shudder at Wag- 
ner? If my acquaintance over the way, in 
her ambition to become the first woman-artist 
in America, lets her house go unswept, her 
youngest-born tumble about the front yard 
clad in a single brief garment, and his prede- 
cessors in age roam the town as wild as 
Zulus, shall I look coldly upon Raphael and 
doubt the piety of Fra Angelico ? 

It would be fatuous to dispute the state- 
ment that thousands of women in Christian 
lands yearly sacrifice virtue and their hopes 
of heaven to a mad passion for dress and 
ornament ; or that tens of thousands starve 
their minds by ultra-devotion to that which 
treats of the seemly covering of the corporeal 
part. For such devotees sane people have 
the same measure of contemptuous pity that 



V 



DRESS. 39 

they feel for gluttons and drunkards. The 
" all things richly to enjoy" of Divine gift 
and permission have been perverted into 
licentiousness. There is a lust for dress which 
falls short of downright bestiality only by 
being in itself trivial and mean. It is the 
infatuation of small minds, and is, almost un- 
exceptionally, the external sign of excessive 
vanity and a limited range of ideas. The 
capital / that symbolizes personality, and 
should, in width, hardly exceed a filament of 
gossamer, is stretched into a cloak for the 
envelopment of the whole being. Over the 
upper edge the wearer sees the outer world 
by glimpses. 

" What / shall wear" is, in the circum- 
stances, a consideration of gigantic interest. 
That so few others care what the result of the 
lucubrations may be, or note the " effect" 
that has drawn off the shallow pool of thought 
to the muddy ooze of the bottom, is so seldom 
suspected by the egotheist that she hardly 
needs our pity. 



40 HOUSEKEEPING AND HOME-MAKING. 

This is one extreme of the arc described 
by the pendulum, as the other is personal 
neglect and slovenliness. No woman — or 
man either, for that matter — can afford to be 
absolutely indifferent to dress. The obliga- 
tion laid upon our sex to make home by 
seeing to it that food is well-cooked and 
attractively served, and rooms clean, com- 
fortable and pretty, extends to neatness of 
person and such attention to attire as shall 
not only avoid offending the eye, but please 
it and gratify just taste. 

This may be denominated the iEsthetic 
Morality of Dress. I earnestly commend the 
consideration of it to those wives and daughters 
who imagine — if we are to judge by their 
practice — that working-clothes must needs be 
slatternly ; the women who make a market 
for the cheap calico wrappers trimmed with 
tawdry strips of more gayly-colored chintz, 
that flap against the door-posts of low-priced 
stores. They are the class who sit down 
collarless to breakfast, their hair in crimping- 



DRESS. 41 

pins, their feet in ragged gaiters, or slippers 
down at the heel. It is hard for a woman to 
respect herself in such a garb. Whether she 
suspects it or not, it is yet more difficult for 
her husband or father to respect her. How- 
ever busy a man he may be, he would rather 
wait ten minutes longer for his morning 
meal when his wife or daughter is the cook, 
in order that she may slip on a decent dress, 
with a line of white at the throat — that indis- 
pensable insignia of ladyhood. 

" The absence of a collar will impart a cast 
of vulgarity to the finest face," wrote Miss 
Leslie in the first quarter of this century. 

It is a rule that holds good in this, the last. 

There is a mixture of parsimony and os- 
tentation in reserving one's best clothes, 
sometimes the only passable ones, for the de- 
lectation of " company" at home and abroad. 
The habit is apt to extend to other things ; 
to beget a fashion of dishonest reckoning and 
sharp practice in word and behavior, if it does 
not finally confirm itself into the principle of 



42 HOUSEKEEPING AND HOME-MAKING. 

putting money, strength, talent, courtesy, even 
religion where they will show to most ad- 
vantage and bring in the largest returns of 
personal benefit. It is scarcely possible to 
overestimate the influence of these minor 
points of ethics upon character and conduct. 
Prevarication in action is as culpable as utter 
falsehood. She who wears ragged underclothes 
beneath a velvet coat and spreads her chil- 
dren's beds with coarse, unbleached sheeting, 
that she may drape the state couch in the 
guest-chamber with fine linen, is seldom hon- 
est and thorough in other respects. The 
father or husband who pays for fine clothes 
has surely the right to see more of them than 
the visitor of an hour or a day. 

It is not practicable to lay down any general 
directions, much less specific rules, for the 
guidance of those who would dress tastefully 
"if they only knew how." In this regard 
fashion-plates are a nuisance and Jennie June 
a snare to such as have not the root of the 
matter in them. A suggestion or two, how- 



DRESS. 43 

ever, may suffice for the correction of glaring 
abuses of the liberty of construction and 
action which obtains with some of the unin- 
itiated. 

Unless you have money in abundance and 
irrefragable taste, do not essay striking cos- 
tumes. A bonnet of " leonine " yellow, cross- 
ed by a lily-white plume, may become a 
beautiful brunette at a fashionable reception. 
With a promenade suit it is vulgar ; in 
church it approximates profanation. She 
who can afford but one best dress for street, 
visiting, and Sunday, should choose black or 
sober colors, and shun the, to some people, 
easily-besetting sin of gaudy trimmings. 
Wear what you will in the way of light and 
fanciful raiment in-doors for afternoons and 
evenings, if a florid taste craves expression. 
In public places they are a solecism. 

Study consistency of attire everywhere 
and always. A silk cloak and a common 
stuff dress arc, in Mr. Weller's phrase, " un- 
ekal." When you air your second-best suit 



44 HOUSEKEEPING AND HOME-MAKING. 

abroad, let the second-best bonnet keep it in 
countenance. A dress hat and a cheap gown 
remind one versed in the etiquette of ap- 
parel of a cactus in full bloom above the un- 
gainly stem and abortive leafage. 

Hygienic reformers themselves being 
judges, there has never been a costume — 
national, provincial, or individual — which 
met the requisitions of health and good 
sense. Eve's fig-leaves had the merit of 
simplicity, economy, and comfort in the 
climate of Paradise. Her daughters have 
seldom compassed so much with one hun- 
dred times the labor. The practical mind 
has little pleasure in fighting unreformable 
abuses. It is, moreover, possible that this 
question of modern appareling is a red rag 
which has sent the blood in blinding surges 
to the assailants' heads. There is a tre- 
mendous weight of evidence in support of 
the assertion that women dress more com- 
fortably and more in conformity to the laws 
of decency and health now than did their 



DUESS. 45 

mothers, grandmothers, and very- far-back- 
indeed ancestresses. We have Isaiah and 
ancient sculpture in corroborative evidence 
of this audacious assertion. 

We wear flannel next the skin ; plenty of 
loose, warm undergarments in winter, thick 
shoes and fur coats, few skirts, and those 
short enough to allow us to walk with ease, 
and educated women no longer lace tightly. 

Dr. Thomas, in his elaborate work " On 
the Diseases of Women," writes : 

** Chapter upon chapter has been written 
against tight lacing in so vehement a style 
that the reader, if she did not reflect, might 
suppose that to this abuse could be traced 
the whole catalogue of feminine ills. If per- 
chance, however, she inspected the unyield- 
ing stays which once compressed the sturdy 
form of Alice Bradford, and which are now 
preserved in Pilgrim Hall in Plymouth, she 
would at once see that the indictment was 
not a valid one ; and similar objections 
might be raised against all the o'-her causes 



46 HOUSEKEEPING AND HOME-MAKING. 

which I have advanced, viewed as isolated 
influences." 

Tight lacing makes one intensely uncom- 
fortable to begin with, and long persistence 
in the foolish practice reddens the nose irre- 
mediably and as certainly as tight shoes pro- 
duce sick headache. Volumes of physiologi- 
cal argument would not abolish the fashion 
of wasp-like waists as speedily and effectually 
as the announcement made above. The 
outraged blood, forced out of its legitimate 
channel, retreats vengefully to a point where 
its settlement must ever remain a source of 
keenest mortification. I have heard of a 
woman who would have been beautiful but 
for this blemish, and, in desperation, applied 
leeches repeatedly to the inside of the nos- 
trils to abate the nuisance. The experiment 
was unsuccessful ; the sullen red held the 
fort obstinately. Nor have I ever known a 
case where lungs and heart were subjected 
to long-continued compression, in which in 
due time the violence done to the vitals was 



DRESS. 47 

not proclaimed by a " crimson-tipped " nose 
as fiery as a dram-drinker's — that is, unless 
the author of the deed died of consumption, 
apoplexy, or angina pectoris before the 
height of bloom was perfected. 

The fact of the desuetude of the suicidal 
custom, — to the unborn offspring of the 
offenders often a murderous one — is proved 
by unmistakable signs. Where fifty women 
padded their busts thirty years ago, perhaps 
one exceptionally flat-breasted one does now. 
Most of our girls need no such appliance, 
being broad of shoulder and deep of chest, 
and our elderly matrons show a growing pro- 
pensity to copy their English sisters in a gain 
of plumpness with advancing years. To be 
thin is no longer the acme of feminine desire, 
especially when a kindly coating of flesh is 
needed to fill out sinking cheeks and de- 
facing wrinkles. 

The young girl should be fitted with some 
one of the numerous excellent bodices or 
corsets now in vogue, by the time she is 



48 HOUSEKEEPING AND HOME-MAKING. 

thirteen or fourteen. These, we may re- 
mark, are totally unlike Alice Bradford's 
" unyielding stays," or those with w^hich our 
own mothers girt them about — machines as 
straight and well-nigh as stiff as tree-boxes. 
They were drawn as tightly about the soft 
upper parts of the abdomen as silken and 
hempen strings could pull them. Many 
had not the strength to lace their corsets 
properly. I have a vivid recollection of 
standing by, an open-eyed and commiserating 
witness of the mysteries of the dressing- 
room, when as a child I was permitted to 
see grown-up young lady visitors prepare for 
dinner or dance. Each, in turn, commanded 
the services of a stout serving-maid who 
corded her with a power of muscle that 
would have insured a Saratoga trunk against 
the most energetic baggage-smasher. Upon 
ordinary occasions the lady, if she were of an 
independent turn, laced herself up, tussling 
vaHantly to insure her bondage. A common 
custom was to cast a loop of the lace about 



DRESS. 49 

the bed-post, as a convenient belaying-pin, 
and strain upon this with the whole weight 
of body and muscle until the creaking con- 
struction of buckram and bone closely band- 
ed the waist as in a vise. The breasts were 
forced up to the collar-bone ; the ribs gradu- 
ally compressed until they overlapped one 
another. Women fainted in crowded as- 
semblies then, for want of breath, which 
would never have had room to re-enter the 
collapsed lungs had not the instant expedi- 
ent in all cases been to cut the corset-strings. 
Boarding-school girls often slept without 
loosening, the lacings that would require half- 
an-hour's work in the morning to make fast 
again. We of this generation are paying, in 
life-blood and tears, for this unholy work. 

Ou7' girl's corset is pliable and carefully 
adjusted to the figure. It is the mother's 
fault if the child purchases a " nineteen 
inch," when she should wear nothing smaller 
than "twenty-two." Unless this blunder is 
made, it is not possible for such a corset as, 



50 HOUSEKEEPING AND HOME-MAKING. 

for example, ''La Reined' to press hurtfully 
upon any part of the frame. The hips are 
protected, as is the abdomen, by their cover- 
ing, the spine gently braced and kept 
straight, and the swell of the breast encour- 
aged by the amplitude of the curves en- 
closing it. One recommendation of such a 
bodice is that it will not continue to fit if 
tightly laced. The thin whalebones bend 
viciously — then break, and prick the sides of 
the transgressor. The finely-tempered steel 
fronts guarding chest and stomach snap and 
the garment must be thrown aside, ruined 
through ill-usage. Another time the foolish 
wearer will know better than to attempt to 
defy Nature and the Rational Corset-maker. 

I make a place gratefully here for part of 
an article on " Dress Reform," which I clip 
from the Newark (N. J.) Daily Advertiser. 
It is a " leader," from the pen of the scholar- 
ly and practical editor. Dr. S. B. Hunt. 

I have an object in drawing freely from 
prominent journals pertinent comments upon 



DRESS. 5 1 

the subject of this work. It is interesting 
and edifying to note in these the drift of the 
best minds, the conclusions reached by the 
most acute perceptions in a profession that 
holds in its working ranks some of the ablest 
men of our times. The Press is not an instruc- 
tor alone nor yet the minute recorder of 
passing events, nor again only the Physician 
that counts pulse, respiration, degrees of 
temperature in the system of the mighty 
Public it has in ward. It is the Seer of the 
Century, chronicling the coming of wind and 
storm and pestilence and the majesty of fair 
weather, when air and sky are to the com- 
mon observer without presage. 

I insert extracts from periodicals and from 
books — as well written and as much to the 
point under consideration as Dr. Hunt's — 
in the body of our volume, in preference to 
using them as foot-notes, for two reasons. 

I would avail myself to the full of the apt 
quotation, borrowing for my opinions all the 
aid the endorsement can give. And, second- 



52 HOUSEKEEPING AND HOME-MAKING. 

]y, I would insure for the extract a reading 
more careful than the casual glance that 
scarcely lingers longer on the starred foot- 
note than while the page is somewhat lei- 
surely turned. 

The testimony of so intelligent a profes- 
sional man and writer upon physiology and 
hygiene is not to be carelessly dismissed, 
even by the radical unused to seeing over, or 
around, his hobby. 

"Men are supposed to dress with simple 
reference to comfort. Women, for some 
inscrutable reason, are equally supposed to 
torture themselves for the sake of shape, and 
there has been no end of foolish talk on the 
subject of tight-lacing and small waists, all 
resulting in absurd and inartistic exaggera- 
tions of the female form. The humbugs in 
ladies' dress are plain enough, and any ob- 
server, even the most charitable, detects the 
padding of the too voluminous form, inter- 
rupted by a closely girded and slender waist. 
How many volumes have been written oji 



DKESS. 53 

the subject of tight lacing can never be told. 
It has been howled about from platforms and 
in all the virtuous magazines. But the fact 
is that a woman who affects loose garments 
is lazy and violates the laws of her formation. 
The present style of dress, close-fitting and 
cHnging to the form, is unmanly, but it is 
very womanly. 

"The wiser anatomists and physiologists 
say that a man breathes with his abdomen. 
There is a regular increase in the expansion 
of his chest down to the line of the midriff 
or diaphragm. The lower ribs are freely 
movable, widen out with every inspiration, 
and crawl in with every expiration, while the 
muscles of the abdominal walls supply the 
exhaust and the expulsive force of the lungs 
above. That constitutes the manly form. 
It is a true part of his machinery. But it is 
not womanly, and only a lazy, or, to use a 
phrase as descriptive as it is coarse, a ' soz- 
zling ' woman will habitually wear a loose 
gown and neglect what physiologists regard 



54 HOUSEKEEPING AND HOME-MAKING. 

as the proper support of the female form 
when engaged in the industries of life, in 
walking or in the upright position. The 
universal sense of women, so far as regards 
decorum in appearance, is to be ' well set-up,' 
like a soldier going on guard-mount, who is 
expected to be clean throughout, closely- 
buttoned, and steadily erect. When we 
speak of a man who is ' soldierly,' we mean 
a fellow with high shoulders, full and capa- 
cious waist, and thin flanks, with rather light 
weight in the quarters. When we consult 
the female graces — which fully expressed 
mean the highest and noblest health of wom- 
an — we mean precisely the opposite con- 
ditions. * A low forehead is an excellent 
thing in woman,' and with that go the droop- 
ing shoulder, the diminishing waist, and the 
full lower form which it is a disgrace for any 
man to carry around. The Greek sculptors 
had this idea exactly, and it is charmingly 
expressed in the * Three Graces,' a work 
which is as pure as it is beautiful. 



DRESS. 55 

" There is another point in this which we 
do not think involves any other indelicacy 
than such as pertains to all anatomical facts. 
When a woman breathes, or it may be a little 
untrained and ill-cared-for girl, she breathes 
with her upper ribs and lifts her collar-bones. 
No healthy man ever breathes in that direc- 
tion. When we see a man puffing up his 
upper chest the immediate suggestion is that 
consumption is his doom. With a woman the 
same lung motion is an evidence of sweet 
and glorious health. The bottom fact is, 
that the nearer a woman approaches the 
masculine form the more unsexed she be- 
comes. The reason of the female form, the 
scanty waist, the strong but narrow dia- 
phragm, are a part of the diplomacy of 
nature, and mean the resistance of our occa- 
sional growing force, which, with a man's 
natural form, would obstruct the action of 
the heart and impede the respiration. The 
anatomists, who have seen thousands of 
skeletons of savage or civilized training, find 



56 HOUSEKEEPING AND HOME-MAKING. 

always the diminishing waist in women, and 
they know why. 

"After all the lectm-es on tight lacing, the 
truth is that Nature demands by her most 
imperative laws that women should have 
small waists, and that the misery and harm 
undoubtedly inflicted by the over-use of cor- 
sets is only a blind and ignorant obedience 
to an instinct which, properly directed, is 
graceful and natural. Still, there are com- 
petent gentlemen who think that their wives 
and daughters should have the same form of 
chest as themselves, and there are doctrina- 
rians who reason that instead of breathing 
with the thorax, as women always do, they 
should breathe with the abdomen, as men al- 
ways do. God ordered otherwise." 

We may further congratulate our sex upon 
the abolition of the terrible custom of wearing 
upon hips and stomach such an immoderate 
number of skirts as were essential to the peace 
of mind of the fashionist who flourished in our 
mothers' time, or in our school-days. It was 



DRESS. 57 

not an exaggeration when the satiric cartoons 
of illustrated weeklies portrayed the full- 
dressed belle wedged in a door of regulation 
width, or filling the whole interior of a coach, 
her escort riding upon the roof. Over the 
wide dispread cage of wire or crinoline that 
gave the balloon-shape to the outer casings, 
she sported twelve or fifteen petticoats, most 
of them heavy with starch and tuckings. On 
the top of all floated a gown-skirt ten yards 
in circumference, and often flounced at the 
bottom. 

I well recollect the horrified expression of 
a physician who, on being aroused at mid- 
night by the sudden illness of his daughter, 
picked up from a chair her clothing, minus 
the dress proper, as she had cast it aside at 
retiring, and bore it off to the store-room to 
be weighed. There were twenty pou7ids of 
it. Just at that era of Fashion's history, cor- 
sets went entirely "out." This girl, whose 
seizure was neuralgia of the stomach, had 
carried this incubus, bound by tapes, about a 



58 HOUSEKEEPING AND HOME-MAKING. 

waist defended from their pressure by one 
thin garment of cotton cloth or linen. It 
was not unusual, on laying off the clothing 
at night, to discover that the strings had cut 
a raw line in skin and flesh. 

Our dear Mrs. Delany thus describes the 
court-dress (date of January 23, 1738) of 
Lady Huntingdon — Whitfield's Lady Hunt- 
ingdon — the warm advocate ten years there- 
after of the principles of the " Calvinistic 
Methodists :" 

" Her petticoat was black velvet, embroid- 
ered with chenille ; the pattern, a large stone 
vase filled with ramping flowers that spread 
almost over a breadth of the petticoat from 
the bottom to the top. Between each vase 
of flowers was a pattern of gold shells, and 
foliage embossed and most heavily rich. 
The gown was white satin, embroidered 
also with chenille, mixt with gold ornaments. 
No vases on the sleeve, but two or three on 
the tail. It was a most labored piece of 
finery, the pattern much properer for a 



DJ^ESS. 59 

stucco staircase than the apparel of a lady — 
a mere shadow thai tottered under every step 
that she took U7ider the load" 

In 1 760 she commends a " neglige " for her 
grandniece, with a " stomacher made to pin 
on," so as not to drag the shoulders of the 
growing girl forward, and subjoins most sen- 
sibly : 

"The vanity and impertine7ice of dress is 
always to be avoided, but a decent compli- 
ance with the fashion is less affected than any 
remarkable negligence of it." 

It is refreshing to reflect that we no longer 
endanger our lives by walking through slush 
and upon damp pavements in thin slippers, 
or load spine and diaphragm with external 
applications of "vanity" and vexation of 
spirit no less than of body, or wear pyramid-- 
al helmets a foot high of puff and powder, or 
short waists that bring the stricture of skirt- 
oindings and gown-belts directly upon the 
tender breasts and most vulnerable portion of 
the lungs. Our costume has still enough un- 



6o HOUSEKEEPING AND HOME-MAKING. 

cured follies encrusting it, but they are not 
enormities. 

Now for the homelier but not less impor- 
ant details of the toilette. And if the intel- 
ligent reader is amused and provoked at the 
circumstantiality with which simple direc- 
tions are given — "the things which every- 
body knows !" — I beg her to believe the 
assertion that everybody does not obey in 
these respects what seem to her the dictates 
of common decency and such knowledge of 
health laws as the poorest and meanest Chris- 
tian in this country should possess. Every- 
body does not know — or knowing, does not 
live up to her belief — that exhalations from 
the body are dirt, and that dirt of all kinds, 
if we except dry earth, is malodorous. 

The night-dress should be warm in winter, 
cool in summer, and always loose in every 
part, that the blood may recede naturally 
from the brain, and the slackened play of 
heart and lungs go on evenly and healthfully. 
Whatever has been worn in the day must be 



DI^ESS. 6l 

shaken hard when taken off, and each piece 
hung or laid out separately upon nail or 
chair. The like precaution ought to be ob- 
served in removing the night-gown in the 
morning. The clinging hum"ors thrown off 
by the pores, sleeping and waking, may be 
dislodged in part while still warm. If suffered 
to soak in cooling into the fabric, they be- 
come offensive to sight and smell, and the 
fruitful source of disease. In plain language, 
they may be described as effete animal mat- 
ter that decomposes rapidly, and with putre- 
faction, emits a sickening odor. 

Immediately upon rising, the bed-cover- 
ings should be removed, shaken, and spread 
out over foot-board or chairs, and the mat- 
tress be left exposed to the air admitted from 
open windows. The practice of making up 
a bed while still warm from the heat of the 
human body is unclean, and, like most un- 
cleanness, unwholesome. The body actually 
loses weight during the hours of sleep, as has 
been demonstrated by repeated experiments. 



63 HOUSEKEEPING AND HOME-MAKING. 

The escaping effluvia (the term is just, how- 
ever impolite) hang, a viewless vapor in the 
air, steep linen, and reek in blankets. You 
can smell them on re-entering your closed 
bedroom after you have been in the outer air 
for a few minutes. If they were never so 
faintly colored, the day would break dimly 
upon your waking eyes. Were it possible to 
eliminate them from the air and condense 
them, you would behold a pound of corrupt 
matter from which you would shrink with 
loathing unutterable. Yet you swallow and 
inhale this with every word and breath while 
you remain in an unventilated sleeping-cham- 
ber. 

Much of this liberated vapor is carbonic- 
acid gas, and deadly to all animal life. The 
bad taste in your mouth before you brush 
your teeth, the ''tight" feeling about your 
head, the slight giddiness and nausea that 
pass away in the bath — all are symptoijis of 
one disorder. You are poisoned! Your 
bedroom, however elegant in its appoint- 



DRESS. 63 

ments, has been all night a grotto del cane. 
Unaired and undeodorized clothes upon bed 
or body are as truly empoisoned as was the 
shirt of Nessus ; albeit usually more slow in 
operation. Pile on clean blankets, shaken 
and cooled every morning, if you "■ sleep 
cold," and set a screen between you and 
direct draughts ; but secure, by means of 
lowered or raised sashes, a bounteous current 
of pure air to replenish the lung-supply and 
to sweep out noisome exudations. 

It is often objected, when frequent changes 
of body-linen are recommended and positively 
enjoined in warm weather, that the family- 
wash is thereby made too heavy. Without 
staying to inquire what may be the truer 
economy in such cases, to pay laundress or 
druggist, I would suggest that the difficulty 
may be obviated in some measure by judicious 
management on the part of each wearer. 
Two changes per week will generally suffice, 
even in sum mer,/r^z^z'^^^ every undergarment 
is shaken and aired thoroughly — when practi- 



64 HOUSEKEEPING AND HOME-MAKING. 

cable, sunned — before it is resumed. Thus 
the linen worn in the forenoon may be re- 
moved when one dresses for the afternoon, 
and hung where the air can blow freely over 
it until next morning. The set for after- 
noon has in turn the same opportunity of 
disinfectment. A garment assumed while 
still damp with perspiration is sure to become 
offensive. This rule premises that aired rai- 
ment shall be put upon newly-washed bodies. 
The bath-room is the best preventive of ex- 
cessive labor in the laundry. Body-linen that 
has been yellowed in the wearing has to be 
rubbed so hard that it soon wears out. 

" Wh}^" asks Corinna Holgate in her 
study of Grecian Myths, preparatory to a 
" High Culture" tea — " why was Venus fa- 
bled to have arisen from the foam of the sea ?"•' 

Aunt Ildy " shot back the answer, quick 
as a flash, an irony of common sense, out of 
a swift, frowning cloud of contempt" : 

" Because you must be clean before you 
can be beautiful !" 



GOSSIP. 

" But the man did neither look up, nor regard, but raked to 
himself the straws, the small sticks, and dust of the floor." — 
Bunyan's Pilgrim s Progress. 

" People will talk. ' Ciascun lo dice ' is a tune that is played 
often er than the national air of this country, or any other," — 
Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

" I remember that Abbie Ann once put out her washing, and 
this fact kept the whole social element of Cedar Swamp on the 
qui vive for a number of days," — Cape Cod Folks. 

Dr. Holland has told us that " the cure 
for gossip is culture." 

The prescription is excellent — as far as it 
goes. But weeds spring faster and flourish 
more rankly in a ploughed and enriched field 
than in the hard soil of a common. It was 
into the swept and garnished house that the 
seven unclean spirits followed their host. 

To the culture — intellectual — that sharpens 
perceptive faculties and disposes the whole 
mind to activity, must be added worthy and 
regular occupation, and just moral sense, 



66 HOUSEKEEPING AND HOME-MAKING. 

integrity of purpose and speech, and Christian 
charity in construction of others' actions and 
motives, if we would save our educated young 
women from the favorite pastime of their in- 
feriors — gossiping. 

Among the woful perversions of terms in 
our language, the inside-out twist which the 
good old Saxon word "gossip" has sustained 
may claim a bad eminence. 

"Godsibb — a relation by a religious obli- 
gation. From God, and szb, an alliance." 

Thus Webster — and in close connection — 
" One who runs from house to house, telling 
news ; an idle tattler." 

A pretty word, little used, is "gossipry." 
It has a quaint crispness about it to which 
tongue and ear take kindly. It signifies 
"idle talk, gossip," or — anomalous associa- 
tion ! — " Spiritual relationship or affinity." 

It is evident to the non-philological reader, 
as to the verbalist, that we sorely need sub- 
stantive and verb to express what we all have 
reason to know so well; that which, with 



GOSSIP. 67 

many women, fills up the gaps left in thoughts 
and lives by the absence of a specific object. 
One that would so absorb into itself the 
wandering energies, so possess the mind that 
everything small — using the word as a syn- 
onym of unworthy — would be crowded out. 
Without this, the runners that should be 
trained into use and fruitfulness, trail wildly 
hither and yon, and like the muck-rake, take 
up straws, and sticks, and dust. How intri- 
cate and unsightly is the mat thus formed, let 
the history of every neighborhood, the un- 
written stories of blasted reputations, thwarted 
lives, and broken hearts testify. 

Where is the first false step ? At what 
juncture of the girl's experience does it begin 
to become pleasanter to believe the tale which 
casts a shadow than that which illumines ; 
easier to credit disparagement of an acquaint- 
ance than to receive gladly a narrative which 
is honorable to the subject and to human 
nature ? When — following the deflected line 
' — do even the amiable and refined acquire a 



68 HOUSEKEEPING AND HOME-MAKING. 

positive relish for tainted meats — in culinary 
parlance, high game ? Is there a biting spice 
of truth in the pessimistic jeti d" esprit — " 
"There is something pleasant to us in the 
misfortunes of even our best friends ?" 

Am /uncharitable ? hasty to judge and to 
condemn thoughtless speech ? May it not 
be that righteous indignation at the unchecked 
growth of a popular evil takes on the vision 
and expression of personal rancor? The 
experience and observation that lead an in- 
dividual teacher to a certain conclusion may 
be unfortunate and exceptional. 

Test my declaration for yourself, my clean- 
hearted Mary, glowing with the novelty of 
the home-coming ; eager to ply in the field 
which is the world, the craft learned in the 
garden-plot of the school. Relate to a lively 
circle of your compeers in social station and 
education, a story of human heroism, of virtue 
that was proof against temptation, of self- 
denial and sorrow borne meekly that others 
might not suffer, of patient toil for noble 



GOSSIP. 69 

ends. Use all the eloquence of feeling and 
forcible diction to send the lesson home to 
each heart. You are heard with attention, 
because the tale is cleverly wrought up. All 
combine to pronounce it " interesting," per- 
haps " beautiful and touching." One optimist 
boldly affirms that it is "gratifying to the 
finest feelings of the heart." Here and there 
an eye kindles or softens under a mist of un- 
shed tears. But people, as a mass, are coy 
in the display of their " finest feelings." There 
is danger, where some are concerned, of mis- 
taking the casket in which these treasures are 
stored for a lumber-chest. The main current 
of talk bears swiftly away from the topic in- 
troduced by you. The optimist may roll the 
sweet morsel under his tongue, but he does 
it after the manner of ruminating animals, in 
silence. There is little to provoke discussion 
in what you have related. It is too smooth 
and round, by half, for enterprising wits. To 
all it is commonplace. To some it is vapid. 
Do not yotc supply an antipodal theme that 



70 HOUSEKEEPING AND HOME-MAKING. 

the experiment may be fairly tried. The 
probabihty is that you will not have to wait 
long before a cynical slur upon truth, good- 
ness, faith — something that comes under the 
head of Paul's " whatsoever things are honor- 
able, just, pure, lovely, of good report" — ex- 
cites general mirth, tempered by weak disclaim. 
Or an adventurous spirit, ambitious of repute 
as a judge of character, a " knowing" critic, 
tells his tale of adroit hypocrisy or bare-faced 
iniquity. What I have long ago named in 
my own mind "the blue-bottle-fly instinct," 
awakens at the dexterous touch, the scent of 
decay. The story is caught up ; tossed from 
an earnest listener to a laughing questioner, 
pulled to pieces that the juices and marrow 
may be sucked and the revellers fatten upon 
the extracted richness. Even the few who do 
not share in the feast are less disgusted than 
they think or would admit to others. They 
retain what they have not relished. The 
limed twig does not hold them, but they carry 
away befouled feet. 



GOSSIP. 71 

The gamin who would not hearken to a 
story of a good little boy, unless he might 
afterwards be treated to one about two bad 
little boys — " uncommon rum uns, you know" 
— was honest in the expression of this instinct. 
At heart he was a nascent vulture, and in his 
simplicity, revealed the hankering after car- 
rion. 

The deduction from these and kindred ex- 
amples is humiHating, as tending to prove 
that the taste for "high" game is inborn, and 
that we possess it in common with vermin 
and the lower orders of birds of prey.- It 
lurks, embryonic, in that recess of unimagin- 
able horrors, the human heart, awaiting the 
process which is to warm it into active 
life, or cast it forth a wretched abortion. 
When allowed to survive, it grows very fast, 
as do all larvae bred in corruption, and feeding 
upon the same. The tittle-tattle of idle mo- 
ments becomes the tattle of hours that ought 
to be busy, and tattle, when it has conceived, 
brings forth scandal. Witness against a 



72 HOUSEKEEPING AND HOME-MAKING. 

neighbor, however light its import, passes 
almost inevitably, by insensible gradations, 
into false witness. 

The girl retails with mischievous glee her 
cleverness in discovering the truth that a 
schoolmate's winter hat, which all the girls 
think " awfully stylish," was made by the 
wearer's eldest sister. 

" Oueer— isn't it ? when their father is so 
rich. It must be sheer stinginess that leads 
them to do such things. Indeed, the family 
have the reputation of being parsimonious. 
Or, it may be that they are not so well off as 
the world says. Their handsome carriage 
and horses, fine furniture, and lofty ways 
generally, may be but a hollow show. It is 
surprising — unaccountable — zvicked in people 
to strain and struggle as some do to keep 
up appearances. Why can't they be honest, 
through and through?" 

** Haven't I heard something about the 
low origin of the family ?" ventures an audi- 
tor, musingly, her ambition and imagination 



GOSSIP. 73 

aroused by the narrative and tempting- con- 
jectures. " For auglit we know, the mother 
may have been a milliner, and the taste for 
dabbling in bonnet-making may be hereditary. 
Such things do happen, you know, in what is 
called our best society." 

** I can believe anything now !" The au- 
thor of the gossip is always the first to believe 
in its authenticity. " I can never trust Carry 
Smith again as I did before I found out that 
about her hat. Why, she let us praise it, 
over and over, without once intimating that 
it did not come from a milliner's. Straws 
show which way the wind blows." 

But now the hum and sting of the "may- 
' bes" from the hive on which she began tap- 
ping "for fun," have angered her. Mirth 
has given place to wrath. 

" If there is one trait which I hate above 
all others, it is deception ! I cannot endure 
anything in the least underhanded !" 

From this time henceforward she and her 
clique will watch Carry Smith ; keep her at 



74 HOUSEKEEPING AND HOME-MAKING. 

the focused-point of a moral microscope. By 
such easy descent is gained the plane of the 
slanderer. Without being consciously mali- 
cious, the bias of her belief is in the direction 
of detraction. It is safe — so runs her know- 
ing reckoning — to parody the dreary old 
hymn and 

" Suspect some danger near 
Where others see delight." 

The gossip prides herself, by and by — and 
alarmingly soon — upon not being hood- 
winked by devices of amiable seeming that 
impose upon the ordinary observer. No ac- 
tion is motiveless, and when the motive ap- 
pears upon the surface, it is presumably a 
specious pretence. The professional detect- 
ive dives below it for sinister designs ; turns 
the bull's eye of Diogenes's lantern into 
the complications of moral machinery for in- 
dications of dishonest purpose, the wheel 
within a wheel. In her natural philosophy 
there is no such thing as a simple mechanical 
power. It must come to pass that she will 



GOSSIP. 75 

invent motive and inner wheel rather than 
be disappointed in her quest. 

A woman who may be twenty-five years 
of age, but who, in face and manner, might 
be nineteen, a limpid-eyed, velvet-voiced 
ing'enue, laughed in my face last week when 
I firmly declined to believe that a man whom 
she professed to like, and whom I had 
thought good and honorable, was a masked 
roud. 

" My dear madam," said the soft voice, 
"you always amuse me excessively. You 
are so refreshingly unsophisticated ! My 
theory is that it is best to doubt whatever 
looks fair. Men are all alike, you know — 
and women, for that matter !" with a ripple 
of sweet laughter. " Only we dissemble 
more gracefully!" 

I, who am old enough to be the married 
belle's mother, eyed her in dumb admiration 
as a perfect specimen of her kind. The sheen 
of her draperies, the brilliant eyes, the 
dreamy legato of her speech, the deliberate 



76 HOUSEKEEPING AND HOME-MAKING. 

delight of her regalement upon the thing she 
had tainted indicated beyond the shadow of 
misgiving the carrion fly {Musca Ccesar).^ 

Yet she is not a misanthrope in the usual 
acceptation of the word. She enjoys life, its 
bustle, variety, and chatter, and dearly loves 
her work. She gloats over a temptingly foul 
morsel of scandal with the tantalizing vivacity 
of the big blue abomination that buzzes pa- 
tience and senses out of you on "muggy" 
August afternoons, and awakens within you 
fresh access of compassion for the much-be- 
vapored Mariana in whose tortured ear, 

"The blue fly sang i' the pane." 

Nine chances out of ten our Musca 
CcBsar establishes to her own satisfaction 
some claims to the title of wit. The show- 
iest fun at the lowest rates is to be had by 
turning the peculiarities and foibles of ac- 
quaintances into ridicule. A mimicking 

* An allied species is the Musca Vomitoria. 



GOSSIP. 77 

grimace that would damage the self-respect 
of a dissolute monkey brings the performer 
into the admiring notice of a whole company 
when the tide of entertainment is at the ebb. 
He has raised a laugh and *' showed up " a fel- 
low-creature. Therefore the party is grate- 
ful, and repays the effort in applause as cheap 
as the wit that elicits it. 

" Pshaw !" cries Lady Sneerwell in the 
"School for Scandal," — "there's no possibil- 
ity of being witty without a little ill-nature. 
The malice of a good thing is the barb that 
makes it stick." 

How easily the accomplishment of mim- 
icry is acquired, and its popularity, we see 
illustrated in the early success of Lady 
Teazle with Sir Benjamin Backbite's clique. 
The country girl lately wedded by Sir Peter 
thus describes to her husband the "curious 
life" she led as " the daughter of a plain coun- 
try squire" : 

" My daily occupation was to inspect the 
dairy, superintend the poultry, make extracts 



78 HOUSEKEEPING AND HOME-MAKING. 

from the family receipt-book, and comb my 
Aunt Deborah's lap-dog. And then, you 
know my evening amusements ! To draw 
patterns for ruffles which I had not materials 
to make up, to play Pope Joan with the cu- 
rate ; to read a sermon to my aunt, or to be 
stuck down to an old spinet to strum my 
father to sleep after a fox-chase." 

Into the emptiness of this life fall a rich hus- 
band and a career as beauty and wit, Lady 
Sneerwell's set supplying the latter. 

" When I say an ill-natured thing, 'tis out 
of pure good humor," she protests. 

Here is a sample of this sort of good 
humor : 

" When she is neither speaking nor laugh- 
ing (which very seldom happens), she never 
absolutely shuts her mouth, but leaves it 
always on a jar, as it were — thus : {Shows 
her teetJi). 

" I allow even that's better than the pains 
Mrs. Prim takes to conceal her losses in 
front. She draws her mouth till it positively 



GOSSIP. 79 

resembles the aperture of a poor's-box, and 
all her words appear to slide out edgewise, as 
it were — thus : * How do you do, 77iadam f 
Yes, madam f" {Mimics). 

This is coarse, but so is all scandal. From 
the very character of the entertainment re- 
finement cannot be a constituent element. 
It costs less and goes further than any other 
social diversion, but it is a caviare to which 
" the general " — viz., the majority — decidedly 
incline. 

Gossipry — to employ the term we like — is 
not, per se, scandal, nor is scandal necessarily 
slander. These sustain the same relation to 
false-witness-bearing that regular moderate- 
drinking does to confirmed inebriety. The 
most innocent "tippling" is a dangerous in- 
dulgence in an age when the taste for stimu- 
lants develops with terrible facility into 
passion. 

I should stultify myself and insult your 
good sense were I to intimate that unfavor- 
able criticism of acquaintances and comment 



8o HOUSEKEEPING AND HOME-MAKING. 

upon conduct is always unfriendly and ill- 
bred. There is a radical dissimilarity be- 
tween fair adverse judgment temperately 
stated and abuse zestfully uttered. It is oc- 
casionally a duty to speak openly of faults 
that mar some characters we would fain ad- 
mire. If you are constrained by your knowl- 
ledge of these to withhold esteem, or shun 
associations approved by others, it may not 
be only proper, but in certain circumstances 
obligatory upon you, to state why you act 
thus. It is a duty to shield yourself from 
the imputation of causeless prejudice and to 
protect others from the risk of misplaced 
confidence. This, however — do not forget ! 
— is duty and disagreeable; not pastime or 
pleasant. When you are conscious of a 
thrill of excitement that is not dread nerving 
you to the performance of the obligation, 
pause for severe examination of motives and 
spirit. Charitable Christians do not bring to 
such an expose elation or even cheerful resig- 
nation. 



GOSSIP. bl 

So well understood is this principle, 
that the professional scandal-monger lards 
her piquant dishes with protestations of re- 
luctance. Even those who listen and credit, 
smile slyly in recognizing preamble and pe- 
roration. She would not be unfair for a 
hemisphere nor unkind for the world. She 
calls heaven to witness to the purity of her 
intentions, angels and men to "overhaul" her 
heart and "make a note" of the unfeigned 
grief with which she industriously sows 
dragons' teeth in her neighbor's grounds. 
She would not act as unlicensed victualler of 
the region, hawking " high " meats from 
door to door, if the duty were not laid upon 
her by fate and strapped upon her groaning 
shoulders by conscience. The sight of such 
an one becomes microscopic with the prac- 
tice of her profession. If furnished with a 
telescope she would instinctively reverse it to 
look through the bigger end. Her specialty 
and craze are for belittling and demeaning, 
not for broadening, never for elevating. 



82 HOUSEKEEPING AND HOME-MAKING. 

The cure of this plague of tongues in indi- 
viduals and in communities begins, as do 
most effectual cures, at home. No better 
municipal regulation for cleansing thorough- 
fares has yet been enforced than the law re- 
quiring every dweller in Jerusalem to keep 
clean the street in front of his own door. 

Set before you steadily a few leading facts 
and the deductions drawn from these and 
frame your conduct upon them, let your 
neighbors do as they will. First, that four 
fifths of the fault-finding and would-be set- 
ting-to-rights done in this life of ours is 
altogether gratuitous — in inception and exe- 
cution a work of supererogation. "No- 
body's business" is best left undone when 
Everybody has his hands more than full of 
his own — or ought to have. 

Next, that your time and powers are too 
costly to be w^asted in the consideration of 
what your neighbors eat, drink, wear, say and 
do. In this sense, assuredly, you are not 
your brother's or sister's keeper. He who 



GOSSIP. 83 

can build wisely and well, desecrates his tal- 
ents and squanders his strength when he sets 
about pulling down walls and sorting rub- 
bish. 

Thirdly, that all the intermeddling of the 
busiest gossips in town and country will not 
do the work you, in your proper and single 
personality, were sent into the world to per- 
form, or release you from the responsibilities 
of that position. Your account is to be ren- 
dered to the Master, not to man. 

" There are gods many, and lords many ; 
yet to us there is but One God, the Father, 
of whom are all things and we tinto Hinir 

It helps the soul perplexed by a multitude 
of officious counsels to look away from friend 
and foe, to this one infallible Refuge and 
Strength. Do your best as unto God, and 
leave the result to Him. This is the one in- 
variable rule of life. Naught can absolve 
you from the sin of neglecting it. The peace 
that ensues upon obedience to it bears the 
spirit on eagles' wings into the sunshine that 



84 HOUSEKEEPING AND HOME-MAKING. 

abides continually above the clouds which 
press earthward. 

Lastly, that, according to your view of 
time's value and brevity, the average term of 
human existence is not long enough in which 
to execute that which you ought, by now, to 
have made up your mind to do. It is a 
divine impatience that makes you intolerant 
of the loss of hours and breath in the discus- 
sion of " They-says" — the filing of the fine 
gold under careless or wanton hands. You 
do well to be angry at such prodigality of 
another's wealth. 

To change the figure ; if the gossip must 
make mince-meat — seasoned with the malice 
without which it would be insipid — of her 
neighbors' characters, teach her by firm but 
polite measures that you will lend neither 
tray, chopping-knife, nor condiments. You 
cannot repress her zeal in the prosecution of 
her trade. You can prevent her from using 
your clean rooms as shambles or kitchen. 

Where varieties of the Musca d^saj^ or 



GOSSIP. 85 

her cousin, the Musca Vomitoria, do much 
abound, prudent housekeepers will put up 
•* fly-doors," and keep their meats out of the 
way. 

Judged by such reasoning and examples, 
tattling in its least harmful form sinks to its 
right place — that of a vulgar vice. For the 
truth of this statement I appeal confidently 
to your knowledge of the sense of self-degra- 
dation with which you recall, in the solitude 
of your chamber, the talk of an evening, 
during which the foibles and private histories 
of people, and not " the real things," have 
kept tongues busily at work and been the 
food of thought. You are disgusted at your 
own folly, vexed with those who have led 
you into dirty lanes and across bogs, instead 
of over sunny spaces and up to breezy 
heights. It is a yet graver question how 
often this experience may be repeated with- 
out blunting your moral and intellectual 
tastes ; how soon toleration will be followed 
by perversion. Regard as a wholesome 



86 HOUSEKEEPING AND HOME-MAKING. 

symptom the shame that impels you to avoid 
looking in the detractor's face as the story of 
another's blemishes is rehearsed. Bashfulness 
in the hearing is virtue ; awkwardness in re- 
plying is grace. 

" 'Tis safest in matrimony to begin with a 
little aversion," is a Malapropish bull. In 
gossipry it is safe and sensible to begin with 
a great deal for the subject, and sagacious to 
be on your guard against the retailer of the 
scandal. 

The harpies tainted in touching their food. 
The slanderer who loves her craft has abun- 
dant internal evidence of her descent from a 
renowned and ancient, if somewhat disrepu- 
table, line. Being carnivorous and insatiable, 
you may not hope to escape her talons when 
your turn comes. It is not enough that you 
are confident in the sense of stainless recti- 
tude. Fair and unpolluted flesh becomes a 
loathsome mass when she has had the han- 
dling of it, and the M. Caesar brood bloat 
upon her leavings. 



GOSSIP. ?>7 

If my metaphors offend nice taste, please 
remember that the theme is one not suited 
to the employment of delicate epithets. The 
despicable filthiness of the thing cannot be 
exaggerated in the telling of it. I would, if 
I could, make the commerce in characters, 
mildly called "backbiting," as odious as that 
plied by the vilest of women ; would organize 
our girls into crusading leagues — total-absti- 
nence bands for the suppression of this scourge 
of social circles and Christian churches. And 
why not ? Whose hand wrote " Thou shalt 
not bear false witness against thy neighbor" 
upon the same tablet and in direct proximity 
with — 

" Thou shalt not kill, 

" Thou shalt not commit adultery, and 
' " Thou shalt not steal " ? 

Do I strain the truth in declaring that the 
slanderer is thief, panderer and assassin — -an 
accursed trinity of death and woe ? It is 
time that decent Christians and philanthro- 
pists awoke to the real nature of this sin. The 



88 HOUSEKEEPING AND HOME-MAKING. 

weight of public opinion, if not churchly 
discipline, should crush the traffickers in 
rumors that grow into lies with the passage * 
from one lip to another. 

" Repeat nothing that you do not yourself 
believe," is a principle the practice of which 
would put an embargo upon three fourths of 
the infamous business. Should more strin- 
gent means be needed — " Give with the tale 
the name of the responsible author." The 
enforcement of this brace of decrees would, 
in a month's time, cause a precipitate and a 
settlement in the foul river that would leave 
the current clear. 

I forewarn you that your avoidance of the 
disposition and habit you are so ready to 
contemn will be a thorny undertaking. Your 
talk of books and what they teach will be 
stigmatized as pedantic; the discussion of 
Nature and of Art as arrant affectation. 
Strangest of all, your defence of the assailed 
will be resented by the benevolent disciple of 
the Backbite school, who would not know- 



GOSSIP. 89 

ingly do injustice to her worst enemy — if she 
had one. Heaven knows that she hates no- 
body ! You may be sure that your attempt 
at vindication of the slandered person, your 
civil endeavor to correct a " misunderstanding, 
natural perhaps, but deplorable," will be as- 
cribed to the least commendable motive her 
invention is capable of supplying. More 
could hardly be said for the ingenuity of 
malignity /z^r et simple. I have but to ap- 
pend that you must take you choice of the 
two evils. 

No ! " Culture" of the mind and taste is 
not a cure for gossip in its milder features, or 
even for coarser and downright scandal. If 
it were, this chapter would never have been 
penned. Nor is it true that one who has 
clean hands and a pure heart can defy the 
Sneerwells and Snakes of the politest society 
in the most refined city of the most virtuous 
commonwealth of our Union, 

I pass several times a week through a 
fashionable quarter of a handsome town, and 



go HOUSEKEEPING AND HOME-MAKING. 

by an elegant house, the residence of an 
amiable and opulent gentleman. At a cer- 
tain window of this mansion Mrs. Arachne 
Webb sits behind a cleverly adjusted blind 
for hours of the daylight and the darkness. 
She is not old, nor yet silly. In her youth 
she was a belle, and still "makes up" well in 
the evening. She has all that wealth and 
social standing and an indulgent husband 
can give her. The world has treated her well 
from her cradle. What moves her to watch, 
in her lace-draped corner, for the passage of 
possible victims of fang and line ? Heaven 
has been propitious to her, and even bitter 
fruits sweeten with sunshine. Yet she is 
ready to cry out in a rage of disappointment, 
of days in which fly-trapping has been dull, 
and of evening watches when no senseless 
moths have been abroad : 

" Let that day be darkness, neither let the 
light shine upon it. As for that night, let 
darkness seize upon it." 

Diligence in business has wrought as a 



GOSSIP. 91 

sequel fervor of spirit. This is the rational 
answer to the oft-repeated query — " IV/ijf 
should So-and-So care to rend the reputation 
of Such-an-One who has done her no harm ? 
No act is motiveless." 

Neither are our gossip's daily works and 
ways. By degrees, s)ie has learned the love 
of work for work's sake. Spying, tattling, 
and detraction are the object of her life. 
She hunts her preserves with the keen nose 
and ardent temper of your pointer when 
you take him afield. Scentless stubble is 
her aversion. 

Covert as is her watch, and her presence 
betrayed to the passer-by only in the acci- 
dental stir of a curtain, or the flash of the 
diamonds on the finger inserted to widen the 
peep-hole between the blinds, Mrs. Arachne 
Webb's post and occupation are as much a 
matter of general understanding as was the 
existent fact of the garment, allusion to which 
made Mrs. Wilfer blush for pert Lavvy, and 
elicited Mr. George Sampson's agreeable 



92 HOUSEKEEPING AND HOME-MAKING. 

smile, and — ''After all, ma'am, we know it's 
there !" 

Everybody in town knows that Mrs. 
Arachne is " there." Saucy youths, in pass- 
ing her door, hum, sotto voce — 

" ' Will you walk into my parlor ?* 
Said the spider to the fly." 

Filmy threads of her spinning tangle in our 
eyelashes, tickle our noses ; even trip up the 
unwary and the weak. 

" She is a dangerous woman !" we say, 
warningly, to our young people. " Be care- 
ful what you say to her." 

Yet we all smile upon her in society, and 
call upon her at decorous intervals. Not 
quite certain whether she is more dangerous 
as foe or as friend, we feel intuitively that it 
is safer not to offend her. She is in delicate 
health — so she gives out — suffering excrucia- 
tingly at times from enlargement of the 
spleen. Whereat nobody marvels and some 
smile bitterly in their sleeves. In company, 



/jossip. 93 

she affects sofa-corners and shadowy, cosey 
nooks, " not being strong" — say those who 
know no better. Those who do, shun the 
gleaming eyes of the still figure, and give the 
be-webbed retreat a wide berth. For she 
spins most cunningly in such circumstances. 
Butterflies on diaphanous wings float before 
her by the dozen, giddy grasshoppers and 
droning bees, and she selects her prey at her 
leisure. 

*' But," reason the incredulous, "a scandal- 
monger so notorious can do no harm. Who, 
among sensible people, will believe her tales?" 

Sensible Christians, by the score, do receive 
them in full faith. Some pass them on with- 
out other contradiction than by attaching her 
name. Some, for the mere love of sensa- 
tion, omit this precaution. The scandal that 
comes smartly to the jaded palate of the 
epicure in gossipry is generally accepted with- 
out demur. 

" I don't believe it, you know," thus the 
accomplice drugs conscience. " But it is 



94 HOUSEKEEPING AND HOME-MAKING. 

such a rich tid-bit that I cannot keep it to 
myself." 

The next repetition will be without the 
qualifying clause. 

There is at once virile and conceptive 
power in scandal. Nothing but the expul- 
sive force of will and conscience can rid the 
mind of it. 

The Psalmist prescribed heroic treatment 
in his day : 

"Whoso privily slandereth his neighbor 
will I cutoff!" 

" What shall be given unto thee ? or what 
shall be done unto thee, thou false tongue ? 

" Sharp arrows of the mighty, with coals 
of juniper !" 

That is — excision and the moxa. 



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XI 



EVE'S DAUGHTERS; 

OR, 

COMMON SENSE 

FOR 

MAID, WIFE, AND MOTHER. 

By " MARION HARLAND," 

Author of " Common Sense in the Household,'' etc., etc. 



SYNOPSIS OF THE BOOK. 

THIS work is the earnest, practical talk of a thoughtful wo- 
man with women, upon what is to them the most momen- 
tous subject of the day and age. Beginning with the birth of 
the baby-girl, the author leads the child up to girlhood and wo- 
manhood, each with its vicissitudes of recreation, study, soci- 
ety, home duties — on to marriage and prospective maternity. 
The question of sex in education is discussed from an unpro- 
fessional and eminently common-sensible standpoint, in its 
bearing, not only upon scholastic training, but as it affects the 
girl in the nursery, play-ground, home, and in society. While 
the writer has read and digested the works of the ablest physi- 
ological and medical authorities on this subject, and quotes 
freely from them in support of her conclusions, she has care- 
fully avoided the use of technical phrases and professional 
dicta. The book is intended for home-reading — as a reference 
and a help to those with whom she is already in full sympathy, 
through the medium of her "Common Sense in the House- 
hold Series" — the Housemothers and Daughters of America. 

The style is easy and sprightly; each chapter is delightful 
reading, apart from the vital questions therein treated, and the 
value of the practical lessons to be learned from every page. 



Xll 



INTRODUCTION. 

WHEN, almost two years ago, I was importuned to write 
a series of popular articles upon the "Physical and 
Mental Education of Woman," I re-read carefully Dr. Clarke's 
" Sex in Education" and said in effect if not in words, " They 
have Moses and the prophets. Let them hear them." 

Still, the proposition had awakened my attention to the real 
or imaginary need for such a work. It was one from which 
my taste recoiled, nor had I — it was easy to persuade myself — 
time or strength for the undertaking. But, once admitted, the 
thought would not down. Once opened, my eyes saw more and 
farther than ever before into the needs, the failures, and the 
capabilities of my sex. 

I saw a mighty class of human beings ignorant of the things 
pertaining to their physical peace; accounting the holiest mys- 
teries of their natures an unclean thing; holding carelessly the 
sublimest possibilities of their kind; never giving a thoughi to 
the awful truth that they control the fate of the coming race. 

I saw Man — owning Woman as his mate with but one, 
and that ihe least noble side of his dual nature; — the conscious 
oppression of her by the coarse and sensual, the repression of 
her intellectual strivings by the arrogant who brook not even 
the shadow of a partner on the throne of Self. With pain and 
surprise I saw the unconscious tyranny of the refined and chi- 
valrous. The velvet glove needs no iron hand within to keep 
Woman — the flattered Angel of Home and Queen of Hearts — • 
in her place. To the boor, she is a kitchen pipkin, valued ac- 
cording to the amount of hard usage she will endure, the quan- 
tity of work to be gotten out of her. To the boor's superior 
in sense and breeding, she is delicate faience, to be treasured 
in a windowed cabinet, very precious, very expensive, and, for 
the practical business of life, very useless. 

I saw that the influence of traditions — some mouldy and un- 
savory, others sweet as the breath from the Indian jars our 
grandmothers kept filled with spiced rose-leaves, — held all 
these wrongs to their work. Public sentiment has decreed 
what shall be whispered in secret, and what proclaimed from 
the market-tower. Old-wives' fables and prejudices outrank 
with the majority of women the testimony of enlightened phy- 
siologists. The girl walks blindfolded between plowshares, 



Xlll 

hotter and closer together than Queen Emma's, and can hardly 
— unless by a miracle of mercy — fail to sear her tender feet. 

Yet, brave men and braver women had already spoken. It 
was meet that these latter should be heard. Women can say 
things to women which we would not bear from men — things 
which men do not kno-v. There is with us a Guild of Senti- 
ment with which a stranger may not intermeddle, as there is a 
Guild of Suffering known in its fullness of bitterness only to 
the initiated. The drawback to a woman's advocacy of any 
cause is that her idealistic, sympathetic, maternal nSi\.\iXG makes 
her a partisan. Her subject becomes her bantling. She is 
restive in argument. Her " can't you see it ?" anticipates log- 
ical deduction. Woman is an instinctive diagnosian. Man is 
patient and systematic in following the clue leading to the 
source of a malady, and in adopting the successive stages that 
promise cure. He, in his turn, is irritated by the inconse- 
quence of readers of the other sex ; tenacious of technicalities 
dear to the scientific soul, and loses strength of style when he 
tries to simplify his treatise to their comprehension. 

I have not the vanity to believe that I can convince the edu- 
cated reason which Clarke and Greg, Napheys and Mitchell, 
Frances Power Cobbe and Mary Putnam Jacobi have not 
moved. 

And yet, my book is written! After the first page I could 
not stay heart or pen. I send it forth to homes where other 
" Familiar Talks" from the same source have found, first in- 
dulgent, then loving auditors. I have aimed to avoid ab- 
struseness on one hand, and baldness on the other. I hope 
there is not a sentence which mother and daughter may not 
read together. I know there is not a line which has not been 
dictated by a sincere desire to be helpful to both. 

Marion Harland. 



XIV 



CONTENTS. 



Chapter I. — Birth, not Beginning. 

The baby-girl — Conjugated in the passive voice — Mrs. Gamp 
— The mother's discovery — Original sin and actual trans- 
gressions — Law of heredity — The burden of lo-day. 

Chapter II. — Infants' Food. 

Mother's milk — Milk-producing food — Old wives' fables — Ef- 
fect of the mother's moods and habits upon the nursing 
child — Illustrations — Foster-mothers — Margaret Maguire — 
Man an omnivorous animal — Substitute for mother's milk — 
Bottle-babies — Importance of regular hours in feeding. 

Chapter III. — Starting Even. 

Story of a child of Nature — Our sons and daughters start even 
— Twelve years of boyhood for each sex — Mortality of sexes 
equal in childhood — Complexion and clothes — Out-door life 
— Dietetics better than drugs — Illustrations from life. 

Chapter IV. — Handicapped. 

Nature not responsible for constitutional weaknesses — The 
mother the true representative of radical reform — Fashion- 
ists and purists — Why few women can walk — Half-girls, half- 
boys — Premature bloom, imperfection — Sinful desecration — 
Formation of business habits in the girl — " Pottering 'round " 
— Mrs. Garfield's bread-making — Dignity of commonplace 
life — From birth to the marriage-day an irresponsible, pen- 
niless pet — Why boys have savings banks and girls do not 
— Domestic bribery and corruption. 

Chapter V. — Reverence of Sex. 

The temple of the body — Practical study of anatomy and hy- 
giene — Childish questionings and maternal lies — False del- 
icacy, criminal reserve — Popular ignorance and pseudo 
modesty — Sins of our grandmothers — Consequences to this 
generation — Frank and serious confidence between mother 
and girl-child — Tell her "Why ?" — How to begin — The plain 
truth, and all of it — "Knowledge never yet destroyed del- 



XV 

icacy" — The study of physiology in schools — Illustrations — 
What are "inconvenient things"? — True heredity — The 
mother builds for time and for eternity. 

Chapter VI. — The First Turning-point. 

Perils of climacterics — Stealthy advance of the consciousness 
of sex — Cure for morbid uneasiness — A fidgety mother — 
Crude growth unreasonable — How to meet peculiarities of 
turning-point — Active employment for mind and body — 
Care of the skin — Sponge and plunge baths merely surface 
drainage — Proper sewerage of the body — Morbid and dis- 
eased appetites — Creation x)f a digestive conscience — Evils 
of spiced food and stimulants — " Temperance and Patience." 

Chapter VII. — Girlhood. 

Girls not women — Longings for young ladyhood — A safe and 
sheltered season — The value of the accumulative period — 
Immaturity not deformity — The mother's duty at this junc- 
ture — Dr. Clarke on metamorphosis of tissue — The made- 
woman and the woman-in-making — Nature can supply, not 
create — "Enjoying bad health" — Health is a duty — "Ro- 
mantic sickliness is bathos and vulgarity." 

Chapter VIII. — Brain-work and Brain-food. 

Silas Peckham and salty fish — Mrs. Peckham, Indian corn, and 
pork — Feeding-establishments and boarding-schools— Why 
girls are sent from home to school — Age at which the girl 
should enter college — Warning-signals from Vassar, Welles- 
ley, Smith, and Mount Holyoke — Fed by contract — Mrs. 
Putnam-Jacobi on mental action and physical health — Indif- 
ference to food ominous — Illustrations — The student's body 
must be built up, not kept under — AVhat to eat, when and 
how to eat — Charlotte Bronte — A college boy's appetite and 
that of a college girl. 

Chapter IX.— What Shall Our Girl Study? 

College catalogues — Our girl's new sphere — The average girl- 
student — Cuibono? — The young life takes root for itself — 
Specific effect of the study of worthy subjects — Benefit of 
school discipline in after-life — Comparison between college- 
bred men and college-bred women — Freemasonic order of 
gentlehood — " My mind to me a kingdom is" — Music and 
painting as electives — Advantages of practical amateurship 
in the fine arts — Cruelty of compulsory musical education — 



XVI 

Accomplishments veneer and glaze — The conventional girl 
and the conventional pattern for a boy — Waste of time, 
money, and misdirected energy — Illustrated — Filling buckets 
evenly. 

Chapter X. — Face to Face with Our Girl. 

Womanly impatience — Impracticability of transmitting individ- 
ual experience — Frances Power Cobbe's appeal to women as 
human beings of the mother sex — Health of uneducated 
woman — Dr. Clarke on "Jane in the factory," and "Jane in 
the college" — Insanity and disease of farmers' wives — Maud 
Muller and the college girl — Health of American domestics 
— Illustrations drawn from a housekeeper's experience — 
Physical ailments and miseries of " Jane in the factory" — 
Dr. Beard on improvement in physique of better class of 
Americans — The girl of to-day is on the winning side. 

Chapter XI. — How Shall Our Girl Study? 

What health of mind implies, and what health of body — Loving 
care of the body combined with gross neglect of it — Causes 
of the rapid degeneration of women-foreigners in America — 
Bridget and Gretchen as imitative animals — Mrs. Lofty and 
her daughters as reformers — Care of the health not neces- 
sarily remedial measures — The body is the soul's nearest 
neighbor — Strain upon the medulla oblongata — Overwork a 
dishonest draft upon physical energy and mental force — 
Sequel of this improvidence and extravagance — Studying 
with headache and cold feet — Causes of insomnia and troub- 
led dreams — Incipient suffusion of the brain — A few practical 
suggestions — Rest an invariable human need. 

Chapter XII. — The Rhythmic Check. 

Heredity accentuated in the Third Part of woman's nature — 
Anaemic blood leads to an anaemic mind — What our grand- 
mothers thought of the Rhythmic Check — A wise and gra- 
cious means to an important and beneficent end — Dr. Clarke's 
mild prohibitory clause — One day's rest in thirty — A few safe 
and easy regulations — How girls study and think, and how 
boys — Dr. Mitchell on " Wear and Tear" — What is "a dan- 
gerous amount of friction"? — Working in deadly, superfluous 
earnest — Effect of mental agitation upon tlie periodical func- 
tion — How to become mistress of yourself — Slop! — Working 
with, not against, Nature — Equilibrium of thought-flakes and 
regularity of blood-tides — The Sabbatical calm. 



XVll 

Chapter XIII. — AwEracAN Worry. 

Women braver, but not more patient, than men — Doing only 
one thing at a time — It is not work, but worry, that kills — 
Will, not feeling, should rule — Taking up ashes with a gold 
spoon — To prove the brain sexless, divorce it from the heart 
— Comparison between excessive emotion and excessive 
study — Inherent and essential healthfulness of brain-work 
per se — Degradation of work into worry — Illustrations — The 
specific for mental excitation — Longevity of clergymen — 
Woman's need of something more tender than philosophy, 
stronger than stoicism — The Better Part. 

Chapter XIV. — What Then? 

Graduated — Home-life, and "What to do with it" — Fancy- 
work, candy-pulls, missionary barrels, and clubs — Desultory 
reading and study — College curriculum and green pickles — 
Specific employment a need — The society girl — Open doors 
for the woman of to-day — Half taught to do nothing — lUus: 
tration — Youth the time for the "learning how" — A look 
ahead. 

Chapter XV. — Called. 

The King's commission — Paternt prescriptions for feminine as- 
pirations — Woman's kingdom — How to make the best of 
one's self— Why women become teachers — Diversity of gifts 
— An anchor to windward — Effect of a vocation upon the 
woman herself — Anxious because aimless — Why the average 
woman "falls in love" — Mrs. Delany's versatility of employ- 
ment and industry — Carlyle on woman's right to study medi- 
cine — Missionary women physicians — Frivolities of the ste- 
reotyped girl-life — Best interests of the home promoted by 
the election and study of professions by women — Obloquy of 
old-maidism — Wise economy of time and forces in student, 
wife, mother, and housekeeper — Emily Bronte's German and 
bread making — Knitting-work and poetic fancies — The "be- 
tweenities." 

Chapter XVI. — What Shall We Do with the Mothers? 

The girl's home-coming — Must the mother be crowded out ?~ 
Outgrown — Upon the same floor with the kitchen — Un- 
considered sacrifices — Grinding down from som.ebody to no- 
body — A sound principle — The mother's only earthly king- 
dom — "Only mother." 



XVlll 

Chapter XVII. — Indian Summer, 

The love that lived" — The highway of middle age — The for- 
gotten habit of learning — Mrs. Holgate's failures— Settling 
down — "Exceptional women" — American Society "too 
young" — The mother the girl's chosen as well as lawful con- 
fidante — An office never to be demitted — The " change of 
life" : its symptoms, its compensations, and its hopes. 

Chapter XVIII. — Housekeeping and Home-making. 

Mme. Demorest on woman's work — Cooking-lectures and 
salad-clubs — Why girls are not taught practical housewifery 
— Illustrations — Need of moral courage in the mother — The 
father's reasonings — " TheStory of Avis" — Excrescent devel- 
opment in man and in woman— Illustrations — The perfect 
intellect in either sex — Mary O'Reilly's love-letter — Peculiar 
trials of domestic life — A rule without exception — Happiness 
and blessedness. 

Chapter XIX. — Dress. 

Curious statistics concerning cleanliness and dress — Dress a 
Fine Art in all ages — The world and women better and more 
sensible now than in St. Peter's time — Just taste in this Fine 
Art versus a lust for dress — Esthetic morality of dress — 
Practical suggestions — Hygiene in dress — Dr. Thomas on 
the dress of the Pilgrim mothers — Our grandmothers' tight- 
lacing — What we have paid for it — Our girl's corset — Dr. S. 
B. Hunt on dress reform — modern improvements upon an- 
cient usages in dress — Lady Huntingdon's court costume — 
Night-dress and bed-clothes — Carbonic acid gas and effete 
animal matter — " Aunt Ildy" on cleanliness and beauty. 

Chapter XX. — Gossip. 

Is culture a cure for gossip ? — A biting spice of truth — The be- 
ginning of the end — Illustration — The blue-bottle fly instinct 
— The Sneerwell school — From gossipry to slander — Where 
the cure must begin — Three cardinal rules — The Musca Ce- 
sar and fly doors — Which is the chief commandment ? — 
"Culture" 7tot a cure for gossip — Mrs. Arachne Webb — He- 
roic treatment. 

Chapter XXI. — Prince Charming. 

Sister Anne and the watch-tower — The abundant sphere — 
Sprivgfield Republican and London Truth on "Uses for Wo- 
men" — Men not our natural enemies — ^"Dr Gregory's " Legacy 



XIX 

to his Daughters" — The accordant Whole — The silent side — 
Idealism of woman's love — Titania and Bottom — An exquis- 
ite touch of nature — Friendship between young men and 
young Women — How to identify the Prince — No chance in 
the Universe — Marriage the risk of all that time can give — 
A squeamish fiction — People who should not marry. 

Chapter XXII. — Married. 

The old-fashioned novel and the modern — Loveless marriage 
an unchaste union — Coming down to everyday life — Wifely 
jealousy of business — "Management" of a husband — Illus- 
tration — Samson's first wife — Essentials and non-essentials 
— Masculine compromise — A sin and a woe sni genesis — Two 
incontrovertible truths — Toleration of foibles and fancies — 
What is innocent and what hurtful — Better lose love than 
respect — Wifely heroism — Absoluteness of the marriage- 
tie. 

Chapter XXIII.— "Shall Baby Be?" 

What must build up the American nation, as such ? — Voting or 
making voters — The Augean Stables — Our grandmothers' 
many children — What are " Women's Rights "? — We are not 
rebellious serfs — Three leading objections — " Suffer not little 
children to come unto me" — Dr. Napheys' significant cau- 
tion — Prurient and prude — Gregg's optimistic prediction. 

Chapter XXIV.— Coming. 

A solemn warning — A too common crime — Sin and peril of 
preventives — " Thinking God's thoughts after Him" — Dawn 
of the Second Life — A few safe rules — Mercy to yourself — 
Probalilities — " Doctors, women, and familie"s — Pregnancy 
not a disease — Disorders incident to this period — Illustra- 
tions — Wholesale baby-slaughter of preceding generations — 
Death drain and patriarchial supply — Mme. du Chatalet — 

, " How beautiful with lilies !" — " The Way is the Way and 
there is an end." 



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viOiXA:''— Academy. _ , .^ . • 01 . ^v, * , .i 

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By HENRY GEORGE. 
I Vol. 12mo., large type, neat paper covers, ,20 



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xCot merely the most original, the most striking and important contribution 
v.Mcli political economy has yet received from America, but it is not too much to 
day that in these respects it lias had no equal since the publication of " The Wealth 
^>f Nations," by Adam Smith, a century ago. — Netv York Herald. 

Few books have in recent ytnrs proceeded from any American pen that have 
more plainly borne the marks of wide learning and strenuous thought. — New York 
Sun. 

A masterly book. Mr. George is the only man who has not merely put down 
clearly, in black and white, what are the causes of social disease, but offered a cure, 
—N. Y. Times. 

A courageous thinker, who, though familiar with the learning of the books, 
follows the conclusions of his own reasoning. — Neio York Tribune. 

If we were asked to name the most important work of the Nineteenth Century, 
wewouldname "Progress aud Poverty," — New York Era. 

The first great economic work in the English language^ written from the stand- 
point and in the interests of the laboring classes.— //is/i ^Yorld. 

Progress and Poverty beyond any book of our time deserves careful study. — 
Brooklyn Times. 

It has been subjected to the criticisms of the candid and thoughtful, the exact- 
ing and the captious, but all agree that it is an earnest, powerful, courageous and far- 
reaching work. The author has stated his theories with a clearness of expression, a 
boldness of thought, and an eloquence of style which have attracted the attention 
of the most profound philosophers, and the most learned of political economists.— 
Boston Post. 

A book which no public man can afford to omit reading.— Washington Critic. 

The most remarkable book of the century in its possible effects upon the course 
of human events. — Charleston News and Courier. 

Every sentence is as clear as a sunbeam; every proposition is as legitimately 
traced to its logical result as one of Euclid's.— (?a?restora News. 

A trumpet call to a struggle which cannot long be avoided. — Philadelphia Star 

A bold and frank exposition of theories now forcing themselves on publio 
notice— Chicago Tribune. 

Earnest, honest and forcible; radical to the root; bold, sweeping and dogmatic 
— Lcniisville Courier- Jou7'nal. 

JOHN W. LOVELL COMPANY, Publishers, 

14 & 16 Vesey Street, Ne'W York. 
5 



PROGRESS AND POVERTY, 

By HENRY GEORGE. 



OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. 



Not merely the moat original, the most striking and important contribution 
which political economy has yet received from America, bat it is not too mnch to 
say that in these respects it has had no equal since the publication of "The Wealth 
of Nations," by Adam Smith, a century ago.— iVisto York Herald. 

Few books have in recent years proceeded from any American pen that have 
more plainly borne the marks of wide learning and strenuous thought.— i\/€!« Yorli 
Sun. 

A masterly book. Mr. George is the only man who has not merely put down 
clearly, in black and white, what are the causes of social disease, but offered a cure. 
— iV. F. Times. 

A courageous thinker, who, though familiar with the learning of the books, 
follows the conclusions of his own reasoning. — New York Tribune. 

If we were asked to name the most important work of the Nineteenth Century, 
we would name "Progress and Poverty." — Neto York Era. 

The first great economic work in the English language^ written from the stand- 
point an4 in the interests of the laboring classes. — Irish World. 

Progress and Poverty beyond any book of our time deserves careful study.— 
Brooklyn Times. 

It has been subjected to the criticisms of the candid and thoughtful, the exact- 
ing and the captious, but all agree that it is an earnest, powerful, courageous and far- 
reaching work. The author has stated his theories with a clearness of expression, a 
boldness of thought, and an eloquence of style which have attracted the attention 
of the most profound philosophers, and the most learned of political economists. — 
Boston Post 

A book which no public man can afford to omit reading. — Washington Critic. 

The most remarkable book of the century in its possible effects upon the course 
(jf hmnBLU events.— Charleston News and Courier. 

Every sentence is as clear as a sunbeam; every proposition ifl aa legitimately 
traced to its logical result as one of Euclid's. — Galveston News. 

A trumpet call to a struggle which cannot long be avoided. — Philadelphia Star. 

A bold and frank exposition of theories now forcing themselves on pnblio 
notice.— Chicago Tribune. 

Earnest, honest and forcible; radical to the root; bold, sweeping and dogmatic, 
—Louisville Courier-Journal. 

This book marks an epoch in the discussion of political and social questions. 

It ought to be read by every workingman in the land, and If it were it would 

work a revolution. — SacratnerUo Bee. 

6 



A book to be stndied, not merely to be read— a book which grapples with qne»- 
tione BO great, and announces doctrines so novel, that the reader is surprised on 
every page.— Stockton ( Col.) Independent. 

It it is rare to find anywhere a style combining to such a degree, clearness nnd 
thoughtfulness, and fire. * * It is a startling novelty shown to be simple; 
socialism become conservative; revolution turned reasonable. — Episcopal Jier/ister. 

The most readable book in the class to which it belongs that has ever been 
given to the world. — W. D. Le Suer, B.A., in Canadian Monthly. 

It is hard to nse language which will do justice to the merits of this book. It 
discusses some of the most abstruse questions of political economy, with such vigor 
and clearness, with the use of such apt illustration and such signs of eprnrat cou- 
riction, as to fasten the attention of the reader from beginning to end. — Jlliodes 
Journal of Banking. 

Progress and Poverty well merits perusal. It conUiins many shrewd suggestions 
and criticism of economic doctrines, which future writers on political economy 
must either refute or accept. Mr. George's reading has evidently been wide; he has 
reflected deeply; he is an acute reasoner; and he is the master of an excellent style. 
~-London Times. 

The dry bones of Political Economy under Mr. George's hands, become endued 
with life. — Mark Lane Express. 

The starting point of a new epoch in the history of social ret orm.- -Hastings 
(Eng.) Times. 

Bi^yond compare, the greatest work on economic and social questions, that has 
yet appeared; and the forerunner of the most momentous revolution. — London 
Radical. 

The most fascinating and powerful arraignment of Landlordism ever written. 
The rapid sale in England of such a book as this, is significant of what is brew- 
ing. Its recent elaborate review in the Tii/ies, which occnpied over four columns 
— an amount of space never devoted by the Thunderer, save to the most import- 
ant works— shows the attention the book is beginning to compel, in quarters 
where it is deemed a " gospel of confiscation." — Dublin Freeman''s Journal. 

Why this work should be so widely read, and so warmly welcomed, whoever 
reads it can understand. Mr. George has written, not to produce a book, but to 
deliver a message. He not only deals with the most perplexing problem of modem 
civilization, in the most striking, not to say audacious manuer, but he exhibits such 
logical grasp, such exactitude of thought, such power of imagination, as places him 
at once, high among the foremost rank of political economists. — Dublin Nation. 

A work of a most striking character and first importance, written in enchant- 
ingly beautifm language. It is difticult to find in modern politico-economic litera- 
ture a work that can compete with this. — Dr. Lindau in Die Gegenwarl, (Lcipsic.) 

" Progress and Poverty " must enlist marked attention. It throws several of the 
most important teachings of political economy into an entirely new and original 
light; and the eloquence T t« thought and expression, will make for it here in 
Germany many readers and followers.— Dr. F. Stoei-el, in Deutsch-e und Interna- 
tiunalt liiio-ue, (Berlin.) 

A remarkable book, that has not only interested but has instructed me.— Prof 
EiMiLE DB liAVBLKYB, lu R«vxn SiMHtiJiqije, (Paris.^ 

7 



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